The Impact of Technostress on Employee Performance in The Manufacturing Industry: Evidence from a Leading Manufacturing Company in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The main objective of the research was to assess the impact of techno stress on employee performance in the manufacturing industry via the evidence from a leading manufacturing firm in Sri Lanka. The development of technology has created a vast number of benefits to organizations in current context and at the same time, use of technology in processes create some negative aspects as well. One of the commonly identified negative factor was ‘technostress,’ which is the negative psychological and physiological reactions individuals experience when faced with an overload of technology in their professional lives. As a result, based on the evidence from the extant literature, technostress hinders the performance of employees at the beginning and the performance of the organization as a whole later. Researcher addressed this gap of extant literature via this study. Technostress comprises of five main dimensions namely techno-overload, techno-invasion, techno-complexity, technoinsecurity, and techno-uncertainty. Hypotheses were formed focusing on the effect of these dimensions on employee performance. A self-administered online questionnaire was used to collect primary data for the study and was circulated among a sample of 110 employees in ABC manufacturing company. Out of 110, 105 responses were received after data cleansing, only 98 responses were analyzed via SPSS. The study was conducted as a cross sectional study, focusing on the positivistic research paradigm and under the category of deductive research and was an exploratory study. Prior to hypotheses testing relevant assumptions were assessed and evaluated the suitability of data for further analysis. Based on assumption testing, it identified that the data are normally distributed. Accordingly, regression analysis technique was used in testing hypotheses and to measure the influence of factors impacting towards techno stress among manufacturing employees in Sri Lanka to their job performance. In addition, correlation analysis was used to assess the relationships between variables. Based on the findings of the study, except Techno Overload, all the other variables have a significant relationship with the Job performance. Based on the research findings, researcher provided some recommendations and suggestions. At the same time, although the study contributes to the extant literature and addresses practical issue, study comprised of some limitations. In addition, researcher also provided the directions for further research such as conducting a comparative study to compare private and public sector.