A structured review of the dark side of technostress : always, everywhere and anytime

Abstract

The dark side of technostress is associated with the prevailing adoption and dependence on technology, and research investigates how and why using various technologies places demands on individuals, thus affecting their well-being. A paradigm shift induced by the fourth industrial revolution (IR4.0) has made technology a necessity and a ubiquitous part of an individual's professional, personal, and social life. Scholars have advocated for on-going research on technostress. Thus, this review took an interdisciplinary approach to understand the emerging developments of technostress in scholarship using inductive thematic analysis. Five themes were revealed from technostress literature, namely: technostress defined, types of technology and characteristics, technology-driven demands, adverse effects of the dark side of technostress, and multi-disciplinary nature of technostress. Applying a matrix on technology characteristics and demand-inducing stressors and network analysis of demand-inducing stressors and outcomes revealed that all the technology characteristics (usability, intrusive, dynamic) map with techno-overload, techno-invasion, and techno-insecurity, while the network analysis revealed that techno-overload, techno-invasion, techno-complexity, and techno-insecurity are the key demand-inducing stressors that result in both psychological and behavioural outcomes summarised to provide a framework on the interdisciplinary nature of the dark side of technostress.