Technostress at workplace: Antecedents, decisions and outcomes (ADO) and future research pathways through a systematic literature review

The COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated the proliferation of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) at the workplace as organisations adopt teleworking, causing stress in employees, termed technostress. The authors aim to conduct an in-depth systematic literature review on technostress by adopting the four- stage “preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses” (PRISMA) protocol for article retrieval and selection. Only technostress-related studies were chosen from peer-reviewed journal articles from two prominent databases: Scopus and Web of Science. We focused on studies published in journals with high rankings to enhance the review quality. We conducted this by selecting only those studies published in journals classified as “A*” and “A” according to the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) journal ranking list. This yielded 73 high-quality studies for the systematic review. The antecedents, decisions, and outcomes (ADO) framework was leveraged to conduct a scientific review. This is one of the pioneering studies to conduct an ADO framework-based technostress review and formally report the Decisions related to the technostress process, namely a) challenge and hindrance technostressors, b) challenge and hindrance coping responses. Research is moving towards studying new technological and non-work life-related antecedents (e.g., cyberbullying) and outcomes (e.g., loneliness). Considering the changing workplace realities after the COVID-19 pandemic, sixteen future research objectives have been put forward based on three research pathways: advancing conceptual robustness, contextual novelty, and methodological rigour. Organisations can leverage insights on key sources, outcomes, and mitigation measures of technostress to develop human resource strategies, as well as training plans to maximise the benefits of their ICT initiatives.