Understanding teachers' technostress creators due to IT use at work: a mixed-methods study

With the digitization of education, the use of information technology (IT) at work has become a requirement for teachers, rather than an option. However, IT is a double-edged sword that brings teachers great benefits and additional challenges (e.g., technostress). The present study employed a mixed-methods design to understand context-specific technostress creators and their associations with cognitive appraisal outcomes and IT use behaviors among teachers. Phase 1 identified six technostress creators-unreliability (UNR), role conflict, teaching interruption (TI), work overload (WO), information overload (IO), and technology integration (TIG)-through semi-structured interviews with 20 teachers. Phase 2 was conducted to empirically examine how technostress creators influence teachers' IT use behaviors (i.e., innovative use [IU] and avoidant use) through cognitive appraisal outcomes. The results from structural equation modeling involving 265 Chinese teachers demonstrated that teachers tend to appraise unreliability, role conflict, and teaching interruption as threats, but appraise work overload and technology integration as challenges. Moreover, challenge appraisal is likely to stimulate innovative IT use and decrease avoidant IT use, while threat appraisal (TA) increases avoidant IT use. The findings extended the literature related to IT research by identifying context-specific technostress creators and linking them to IT use among teachers.