Measuring Technostress in Corporate Culture: Insights from the 10-K Annual Reports

This study introduces an innovative approach for quantifying the technostress phenomenon, drawing on textual narratives from the firm’s annual report. Based on a dataset covering the Standard and Poor’s 500 (S&P 500) index firms, we analyze 2532 10-K annual reports and highlight the key contributors of technostress across six different dimensions of technostress using a combined score. A major advantage of the new six-dimensional scoring framework is that it offers a set of objective metric proxies to capture technostress without bias, utilizing a refined list of 42 key clues derived through factor analysis. Also, it adopts natural language processing, revealing hidden patterns and anomalies that indicate technostress. We further validate this framework by applying fixed-effect regression models to examine the impact of technostress on productivity. The main results imply that the four technostress dimensions presented in techno-risks, insecurity, uncertainty, and invasion negatively impact firms’ productivity. This framework offers practical implications for firms, allowing them to generate a rich profile concerning the degree of technostress associated with existing practices, highlighting the crucial need for advanced interventions, facilitating comparisons with other firms from the same or different industries, as well as cross-country comparisons.