Appraisal of email use as a source of workplace stress : a person-environment fit approach

Stich, Jeff and Tarafdar, Monideepa and Stacey, Patrick Keith and Cooper, Cary Lynn (2019) Appraisal of email use as a source of workplace stress : a person-environment fit approach. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 20 (2). pp. 132-160. ISSN 1536-9323

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Abstract

The paper develops and tests theory that explains under what conditions the extent of email use is appraised as a stressor. Integrating concepts from information acquisition and person environment fit theories, we hypothesize that individuals appraise their extent of email use as stressful based on the mismatch between their current and desired extents of email use. We define such match as email fit and mismatch as email misfit. We first develop a conceptual framework that associates email misfit with the individual’s experience of three key workplace stressors – work relationship stressor, job control stressor and job conditions stressor. We then develop hypotheses framing the relationship between email fit and misfit, and these stressors. We test our hypotheses by applying quadratic polynomial regressions and surface-response analysis, to survey data obtained from 118 working individuals. The paper makes three theoretical contributions. Firstly, in reporting a theoretical and empirical construction of email fit and misfit and their relationship to workplace stressors, it shows that, email misfit is appraised as stress-creating. That is, both too much and too little email compared to what the individual desires, are associated with stressors. In doing so and secondly, it shows that IT use (in this case, email) is appraised as stressful both when it exceeds (i.e., associated with overload) and fails to meet (i.e., associated with underload), the user’s expectation and preference. Thirdly, it suggests the person environment approach as a theoretically novel way to conceptualize the cognitive appraisal and judgement associated with information under - and over – acquisition, and shows workplace stressors as potentially new effects associated with them.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Journal of the Association for Information Systems
Additional Information:
Copyright © 2019 by the Association for Information Systems. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and full citation on the first page. Copyright for components of this work owned by others than the Association for Information Systems must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists requires prior specific permission and/or fee. Request permission to publish from: AIS Administrative Office, P.O. Box 2712 Atlanta, GA, 30301-2712 Attn: Reprints or via email from publications@aisnet.org.
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1700/1710
Subjects:
?? information systemscomputer science applications ??
ID Code:
123998
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
12 Mar 2018 09:54
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
26 Feb 2024 00:38