Abstract:

Technology is reaching all areas of our lives. The fact that technology is already part of our daily routine causes that people have to adapt to these changes quickly, and to keep up with these fast advances of the Information and Communication technology (ICT)’s, people have to update their knowledge and skills, and it can produce technostress. Studies have found that technostress has a negative impact on both the health of people and their productivity. The present work aims to identify the emergence of technostress among administrative staff. 294 administrative employees from a University answered the standardized Media Use questionnaire that measures usage frequency, media skills, technostress, socio-demographic factors and feelings on media usage. The socio-demographic variables age, gender, and skills were analyzed to find out whether these variables, as some previous literature had suggested, had some influence on the technostress perception. The results in our case showed that there is no significant difference in perceiving technostress between men and women. At the same time, we found that older people perceive more technostress than young people and that with increasing level of Information Technology (IT) skills the participants perceived less technostress. The results are an important piece of information for the human resources departments. They indicate possible ways to fight technostress such as to invest into courses or trainings for the employees, to the older ones in the first place.

Keywords:

New media, technostress, age, gender, skills.