Fighting Technostress: A Multiple Case Study of Three French Companies

This study examined the adaptive behaviors of team managers (TMs) in the fight against technostress in the information and communication technology (ICT) environment. Based on the opinions of employees and experts, companies use exchanges, coordination, cooperation, and communications between employees and TMs as strategies for dealing with complex and stressful situations. These strategies are communicated to TMs as adequate and operational adaptive strategies, and employees then apply them. We focused on socio-technical (ST) theory, which is "an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in the workplace" (Hughes et al. 2017). Long (2013) defines "socio-technics" as the interdependence of an organization or society's social and technical aspects. Thus, "contextual dependencies inherent in [an] ST system mean that interactions among all elements within that system contribute to shaping the whole" (Sadok and Bednar 2017). Although many studies explore certain organizational aspects of the impact of work tasks and the effects of job roles, cultural deference, volition, and responsibility within an organization, the stakeholder perspective is largely ignored. Therefore, this study focused on a certain class of stakeholders (Coakes and Elliman 1999)—TMs— to bridge this literature gap. Primarily, this study answered the following questions regarding TMs: (1) What adaptive strategies do TMs adopt to manage technostress levels in an interactional environment? and (2) What coping strategies do TMs choose, given the type of coping identified? Theoretically, the study was conducted in the context of ICT management using "interdependence" (Deutsch 1973) and leader-member exchange (LMX) concepts, where information overload and technostress affect TMs (Graen and Cashman 1975). Subordinates also influence their superiors in the hierarchy of power (Blackburn, 1981); theirs is an interpersonal power relationship wherein TMs and employees depend on each other. This allowed us to describe the processes used by TMs and employees to develop various behavioral interdependencies in their respective roles. Rather than a single common type of relationship or exchange, managers develop different ones with each subordinate (Graen and Cashman 1975; Liden and Graen 1980). To express the differential relationships stemming from resource restrictions within a company, Dansereau et al. (1975) employed the vertical dyad linkage approach, a theory that deals with the individual and dyadic relationships formed between leaders and their subordinates. We conducted an empirical multiple case study to identify types of coping strategies and adopt interactional analysis, as we were interested not only in the individuals but also the interactions of this dyad's elements that help managers address technostress's negative effects.