Exploring the Impact of Technostress on Work-Family Conflicts in Remote IT Work Settings in Sri Lanka and The Moderating Effect of Perceived Organizational Support

Abstract

Technostress stemming from the use of information technology (IT) has become a major source of stress in the modern workplace. Most of the researchers show that techno-stressors negatively affect employees' work attitudes and performance, however, few researchers know about the effect of technostress on employees' non-work lives. Although there is enough literature on technostress, work-family conflict, and perceived organizational support in the western region. There is less research in Sri Lanka context to test the impact of technostress on work-family conflict, especially after the covid. Hence, this study intends to contribute to filling the knowledge gap by looking into the impact of technostress on work– family conflict, and the moderating effect of perceived organizational support. This study followed a cross-sectional quantitative research framework. Data were collected through a standard questionnaire from a sample of 249 employees working in remote IT work setting in Sri Lanka using the multi-stage sampling method; individual employees from five companies were selected based on the stratified sampling method and a simple random sampling method was used to select the sampling unit. The majority of the sample is made up of men, who represent 56.2% of the total number of respondents, while women represent the remaining 43.8%. Descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, regression, and correlation analysis were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The results indicated that there is a strong positive impact of technostress on work-family conflicts and perceived organizational support moderates the association between technostress and work-family conflict. However, perceived organizational support doesn’t significantly moderate the relationship between technostress and work-family conflict. Consequently, this study presents relevant implications for organizations, identifying strategies that allow them to reduce technostress and work-family conflict. Further, this study concluded that providing organizational support and creating policies favourable to work–life balance assist employees in managing technostress better and enhance work-life balance by minimizing the work-family conflict. Moreover, in this study perceived organizational support, as a moderating variable, was considered as a single construct, ignoring the different dimensions of organizational support. Therefore, future research can be further developed by adding dimensions under perceived organizational support.