Computer-Related Technostress in China

Technostress has been defined as any negative effect on human attitudes, thoughts, behavior, and psychology that directly or indirectly results from technology [8]. With the recent widespread application of IT and the Internet throughout China, technostress has become a serious issue for both users and IT professionals due to its potential effect on users’ mental health and on-the-job productivity. Chinese employees are surrounded, often overwhelmed, by modern technology. The top 100 largest Chinese enterprises, accounting for 25% of China’s GDP, are investing heavily ($10–$15 billion annually) in new IT applications, including enterprise resource planning systems. A 2002 report by the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry stated that there are 380 million mobile phone subscribers in China, making the country the world’s largest mobile phone market. And a survey conducted in 2004 by the China Internet Network Information Center found that 87 million Chinese frequently accessed the Internet in 2004, an increase of 19 million, or 27.9%, over 2003.

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Unlike the findings in similar studies in the West, the overall technostress level, or the mean score of the five components, appears to have no significant effect on Chinese employee productivity.

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The Internet is having a profound sociological and psychological effect on traditional Chinese employees, many with only limited backgrounds in any kind of IT. The IT district known as Zhongguancun, Beijing is a famous technology cluster where over 70% of its firms engage in the development and/or manufacture of IT products and services. According to a 2004 health survey conducted by the Beijing Baizhong Medicare Center (www.bzmedicare.com) of Zhongguancun’s white-collar workers, 46% of the respondents reported having slight mental health dysfunction, much higher than the Chinese average (11%); 52.3% reported having mental anxiety; and 37.1% reported having difficulty in their interpersonal relationships [1]. Another survey, also conducted by the Beijing Baizhong Medicare Center in 2004, of the health status of all types of Zhongguancun employees found that 97% of the respondents were planning to take further training; 51.05% felt compelled to study in their spare time; and 84.2% felt “very high” job stress [2]. These employees reported feeling that if they could not keep up with the fast-changing technologies they would be likely to lose their jobs.

Despite the potential benefits of using new Internet-based and other computer technologies, Chinese employees often feel frustrated and distressed in their struggle to adapt to rapidly advancing and increasingly complex technology. One result is that employee productivity will suffer [4]. It is therefore critical for Chinese managers to understand the implications of technostress. Here, we explore the components of computer-related technostress and report the results of our own 2003 survey of 700 Chinese employees in 12 companies on how technostress influences the productivity and perceptions of Chinese employees from a variety of demographic groups. We also propose a number of tactics for alleviating technostress in Chinese companies.

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Research Issues

Technostress (also known as technophobia and computer anxiety) manifests itself in two distinct but related ways: the struggle to accept computer technology; and the more specialized form of over-identification with computer technology [3]. Extreme stress may result in health-related problems, including cardiac disease, hypertension, and migraine headaches. It can also cause job burnout, including job dissatisfaction, emotional exhaustion, and even the intention to quit.

Several studies have focused on causes and measurements of and alleviating strategies for computer-related technostress. For instance, four components of technostress affecting librarians, identified in [5], include performance anxiety, information overload, role conflicts, and organizational factors. An open-ended questionnaire survey on job stress of IT professionals in 161 firms in five U.S. metropolitan areas (two Midwestern, three Eastern) reported in [7] identified 33 stressors related to training, deadlines, coworker pressure, performance evaluation, job security, career development, and user demands. Despite the empirical foundation of technostress research, our knowledge of the source and effects of technostress on Chinese employees is limited. Here, we attempt to answer two basic research questions: Does technostress affect employee productivity in China, and if it does how does it show itself?; and Does the level of technostress of Chinese employees differ in terms of age, level of computer literacy, technology complexity, and company reward structures intended to promote computer literacy?

To understand the effects of technostress, we first need a good instrument to measure it. The questionnaire in [6] used U.S. data to identify five components of technostress:

• Techno-overload. Greater workload, faster work speed, or change of work habit caused by new technology;
• Techno-invasion. Technology invading personal lives, so less time is spent with family or on vacation, giving the time over instead to learning about new technology;
• Techno-complexity. The inability to learn or deal with the complexity of new technology;
• Techno-insecurity. Technology-induced job insecurity (such as fear of being replaced by more skilled people and the constant push to update technical skills); and
• Techno-uncertainty. The uncertainty of technology (such as constant changes in computer hardware and software).

In 2003, we translated the questionnaire [6] into Chinese, making minor revisions to accommodate the Chinese writing style. We included a series of statements about the five technostress components; examples are: I am pushed by the technology to work faster; I have to sacrifice my vacation and weekend time to train myself in new skills; My workload has increased due to increased system complexity; and I have to constantly update my skills to avoid being replaced. We asked the respondents to circle their level of agreement with each specific statement on a five-point scale (from “strongly disagree” at one to “strongly agree” at five). We also included perceptual questions about level of individual productivity and various demographic variables.

We distributed the survey to a random sample of 700 employees in 12 Chinese companies based in Xi’an, Shenzhen, and Shanghai. Five companies were in the IT development industry, three were in the banking and financial management industry, two were in traditional manufacturing, one was in real estate, and one was in the transportation industry. Almost 25% of the respondents were supervisors or top managers, the rest professional staff; about 30% were female; 34% were younger than 26 years of age; 54% were 26–35; and the rest were 36–55. We collected 437 valid responses, a response rate of 62.4%.

We applied multiple regression analysis to explore the effects of overall technostress and the five technostress components on individual employee productivity. And to understand whether levels of technostress differ across individual characteristics, we examined four demographic variables, each split into three groups:

• Age of the respondent. Younger than 26, 26–35, and older than 35;
• Computer literacy of the respondent. Low, moderate, and high;
• Technology complexity of computer-based tasks performed by the respondent. Simple, moderate, and complex; and
• Company reward to employees for increasing their computer literacy. No reward, moderate reward, high reward.

We then performed ANOVA analysis, or ANalysis Of VAriance, a way to test the significance of overall differences across multiple groups, to investigate the overall significance of technostress differences across the three groups. We followed with pairwise comparisons of group difference using Scheffe’s test, targeting the significance of technostress differences between any two of the three groups (see the Table).

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Implications

The regression results are quite interesting. Unlike the findings in similar studies in the West, the overall technostress level, or the mean score of the five components, appears to have no significant effect on Chinese employee productivity. However, looking deeper into each component revealed that techno-overload does have a significant positive effect on individual productivity, while techno-invasion and techno-insecurity significantly hurt individual productivity. Using new technologies pushes employees to work faster and be more productive, and the stability-oriented Chinese culture often tells employees to endure work overload rather than quit their jobs. But extremely high workload inevitably overwhelms employees’ personal lives. In addition, extra work can increase employee anxiety; employees may feel they can no longer keep up with the pace and fear losing their jobs. These factors significantly hurt employee productivity in the long run. Therefore, Chinese companies should look to introduce new technologies rationally and gradually. A reasonable amount of encouragement from management for employees using new technology may help improve individual productivity, but excessive technology-related pressure leading to stress in employees’ personal lives or to job insecurity are counterproductive.

With respect to age, employees older than 35 generally feel more technostress than the two younger groups, especially the stress associated with techno-overload and techno-complexity. Older employees often form rigid ways of thinking and are used to conventional work settings and procedures. However, rapidly changing technology demands that they continuously learn new skills, even though they have more mental resistance to change than their younger colleagues. Meanwhile, as age increases, learning capacity can decrease, causing them yet more difficulty adjusting to new technologies. In Chinese society, older-than-35 workers also generally bear the greatest burden of family support. As a result, when facing emerging technologies, older employees are more likely to feel greater workload and obstacles to learning. For this group, companies should either improve training and provide more convenient learning facilities or shift them to less technology-intensive positions. In addition, companies should also provide effective communication mechanisms. Better communication with supervisors, younger colleagues, and more skilled people is more likely to help alleviate technostress and resistance toward new technology implementation.

Analyzing whether employees with different levels of computer literacy perceive different levels of technostress, we found that, in the case of techno-overload, employees with relatively less computer literacy also feel less stress than their counterparts with more computer literacy. However, employees with less computer literacy do feel more stress than employees with more literacy when dealing with techno-complexity. In many Chinese companies, we found that people with more ability and technical skill are often frazzled, while less-skilled employees are much more relaxed.

This workload distribution can be explained by the fact that managers tend to “whip the fast cow,” or assign more tasks to more-capable people. Some tasks are even beyond their normal duties. Colleagues also turn to them for help handling problems with software applications. When a new technology is introduced into an organization, the more-skilled people are often asked to try it first and are then expected to train the others. Therefore, to alleviate the techno-overload of employees with more computer literacy, management must set up a good technology support mechanism to provide timely help to all employees. In addition, it must give employees sufficient training based on their computer-literacy levels. Any extra workload must be recognized and compensated.

With regard to how employees perceive technology complexity, simpler tasks cause less technostress than more complicated tasks. One task may be simple to employees with more computer literacy, while the same task may seem complicated to others. Therefore, adequate training can indirectly alleviate the employee stress caused by having to deal with new technology. Management could offer a series of courses to solve the technostress problems associated with techno-complexity, especially for employees with less computer literacy. Meanwhile, companies might consider involving employees in the introduction and implementation process. Direct participation helps prepare employees for the coming changes, thus reducing their technostress.

We also found that Chinese companies that reward employees for increasing their computer literacy often cause them significantly more technostress. As discussed earlier, a certain level of pressure for learning new technical skills may be beneficial for Chinese employees, helping them improve their on-the-job productivity, but very high levels of technostress are ultimately counterproductive. While stress from pursuing unreasonably high rewards might help boost productivity temporarily, it might also be psychologically oppressive in the long run [9]. Company policies designed to reward computer literacy should be used judiciously and not pushed so far that they unintentionally serve only to increase technostress among employees.

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Conclusion

Computer-related technostress affects Chinese employee productivity in different ways, often costing companies in terms of lost productivity and employee turnover. Companies must take practical measures to cope with it, including building better communication mechanisms among employees, providing employees good technology training, encouraging employees to participate in the introduction of new technologies, providing timely technology support, and setting up rational reward systems.

However, we’d also like to know whether when a company alleviates technostress in one dimension, does it simultaneously drive down the overall technostress level as well? For instance, when a company trains its employees, a good amount of employee work and leisure time may be occupied, in turn increasing employees’ workload and possibly claiming far too much of their personal lives. They may feel greater overall technostress in the short term, but in the long term, when they are more familiar with the technology, they are also likely to be able to accomplish their jobs that much more efficiently—and feel that much less technostress.

Effective stress-relieving strategies involve personal, organizational, and cultural factors. When it comes to alleviating technostress among all kinds of employees, Chinese managers can thus learn from their Western counterparts but must keep in mind the special characteristics of their own culture that have played such an important role in our study of how technostress affects worker attitudes and job performance, along with corporate productivity.

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