Technostress creators and job outcomes: theorising the moderating influence of personality traits

Although prior research has examined the influence of technostress creators on job outcomes, insights into the influence of personality traits on the perceptions of technostress creators and their consequent impacts on job outcomes are rather limited. Such insights would enable a deeper understanding about the effects of individual differences on salient job-related outcomes. In this research, by leveraging the distinctions in personality traits offered by the big five personality traits in the five-factor model and grounding the research in the transactional model of stress and coping, we theorise the moderating influence of personality traits on the relationships between technostress creators and job outcomes, namely job burnout and job engagement. Specifically, the study theorises the mechanisms through which each of the specific personality traits openness-to-experience, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and extraversion interacts with technostress creators to differently influence job burnout and job engagement. We test the proposed model in a field study based on a survey of senior organisational managers who regularly use information and communication technologies for executing professional tasks. Although technostress creators are generally associated with negative job outcomes, our results also show that for individuals with certain personality traits, technostress creators may result in positive job outcomes. The study thus contributes to the technostress literature, specifically by incorporating the salient role of individual differences. The study also provides insights for managers who should pay special attention to allocating specific job roles to employees with particular personality traits in order to optimise job-related outcomes.