Exploring technostress in disruptive teaching practices

• Date: 14 July 2023
• Pages: 328-343
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWHM-10-2022-0161
• Published date: 14 July 2023
• Subject Matter: Health & social care,Healthcare management,HR & organizational behaviour,Human resource policy,Employee welfare
• Author: Sara Willermark,Karin Högberg,Pernilla Nilsson

Exploring technostress in

disruptive teaching practices

Sara Willermark

School of Business Economics and IT, University West, Trollhattan, Sweden and

The School of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences, Halmstad University,

Halmstad, Sweden

Karin H€

ogberg

School of Business Economics and IT, University West, Trollhattan, Sweden, and

Pernilla Nilsson

The School of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences, Halmstad University,

Halmstad, Sweden

Abstract

Purpose –In this study, the authors explore teachers’experiences of work during the pandemic using the

analytic lens of technostress. More specifically, the authors investigate how the sudden transition to distance

education induces technostress among teachers in relation to their teaching practice.

Design/methodology/approach –The data gathering method constitutes a questionnaire that explores

how teachers’work situation was affected by shifting to distance education. 286 Swedish teachers answered

the open-ended questionnaire.

Findings –The results demonstrate how technostress creators, technostress strains and teachers’coping

strategies are expressed in teaching practice during an extreme case of digitalization.

Originality/value–The authors contribute to the work on technostress by suggesting the theoretical concept

of “technorest”to shed light on alternative effects of the digitalization of work practice. Furthermore, the

authors give examples of technorest creators which the authors term “techno-shields”and “techno-security”.

The results could be interesting to enhance the understanding of the digitalization of work practices and

cultivate a more favorable work situation.

Keywords Digitalization, Teacher, Remote work, Technostress, Technorest

Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction

The COVID-19 crisis turned our daily and professional lives upside down, with the

requirements fororganizations to transition operations to enable remotework (e.g. Karanika-

Murray and Ipsen, 2022;Nosratzadeh and Edrisi, 2022;Panteli et al., 2022;Reineholm et al.,

2022;Waizeneggeret al., 2020).Education constitutedno exception and in lightof the pandemic,

students,teachers and school leadersaround the world weredirected to distance educationand

teachingpractice which refers to classroom teachingand related duties (Willermark,2018)was

heavily disrupted(Carlsson et al., 2022;Carpenteret al., 2020;Kaden, 2020). Thus, although the

digitalization of education has been ongoing for the last decades, the pandemic caused an

extreme case of digitalization. Currently, there is an abundance of research that deals with

IJWHM

16,4

328

© Sara Willermark, Karin H€

ogberg and Pernilla Nilsson. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited.

This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may

reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-

commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of

this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

Data availability: The corresponding author can be reached for reasonable requests for the datasets

created during and/or examined during this investigation.

Conflict of interest: None.

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

https://www.emerald.com/insight/1753-8351.htm

Received 31 October 2022

Revised 23 January 2023

19 May 2023

Accepted 28 June 2023

InternationalJournal of Workplace

Health Management

Vol. 16 No. 4, 2023

pp. 328-343

Emerald Publishing Limited

1753-8351

DOI 10.1108/IJWHM-10-2022-0161

education duringthe pandemic from different perspectives and contexts(e.g. Carpenter et al.,

2020;Hartshorne et al., 2020;Kaden, 2020;Leithwood et al., 2020). Several studies reveal

challenges, such as creating content for online spaces, learning new delivery tools and

becomingfamiliar with onlinepedagogy (Hartshorne et al., 2020). Studies alsoreport difficulties

caused by insufficient technological and pedagogical support at the local school as well as a

lack of competenceand experience in the daily use ofdigital technology (Dong, 2020;Whalen,

2020). It has beensuggested that the integrationof technology in teaching may becomea focus

of tension and anxiety among teachers, causing fragmentation and stress (Penado Abilleira

et al., 2021;€

Ozg€

ur, 2020). Stress related to the use of technology in the workplace is often

described as technostress (Ayyagariet al., 2011). Previous research ontechnostress points out

stressors relatedto the use of technology as information overload (Tarafdar et al., 2007), work

overload (Ayyagariet a l., 2011) and blurred boundaries between private and professional life

(Tarafdaret al., 2007). In the context of education,the incorporation of technologymay become

a focus of stress and anxiety among teachers, influencing their daily lives, both professional

and private (Fern

andez-Batane ro et al., 2022). These situations can create negative stressors

among the teachersand affect their work environment and health (Fern

andez-Bataneroet a l.,

2021). In this study, we explore teachers’experiences of work during the pandemic using the

analytic lens of technostress. We ask the followingresearch question:

RQ1. How does the sudden transition to distance education induce technostress among

teachers in relation to their teaching practice?

The remaining part of this article will be structured as follows. First, a presentation of related

research on work during the pandemic will be provided. Next, we present our theoretical

perspective of technostress. After that, we present our methodology, including the context for

data production, data collection, data analysis and ethics. Thereafter we present our results

followed by a discussion and conclusions.

2. Related work

Due to the pandemic, the number of people working from home increased drastically in various

professions. In a report, Eurofound (2020) investigated people’s living and working conditions

during the pandemic by collecting data across the European Union. The results show that many

employees report a positive experience. Still, employees who worked from home more frequently

report working in their free time they more often reported feeling isolated. Similarly, Ipsen et al.

(2021) explored European knowledge workers’experiences of working from home during the

early weeks of the pandemic. The study mapped the most important advantages and

disadvantages of working from home. The results showed that most people stated a more

positive rather than negative experience of working from home, with the main advantages of

work–life balance, improved work efficiency and greater work control. The main disadvantages

reported included home office constraints, work uncertainties and inadequate tools.

Additionally, researchers have explored education during the pandemic, from students’

(Gonzalez et al., 2020;Loeb and Windsor, 2020), school leaders’(Azor



ınet al., 2020;

Leithwood et al., 2020;Pollock, 2020) and teachers’perspective (e.g. Kaden, 2020;Klapproth

et al., 2020). In this study, we focus on teachers’experiences. For example, Kaden (2020)

usedasinglecasestudytoexplorethetransition for a teacher in a primary school in the US

and illustrates how the transition to distance learning brings an increased workload for the

teacher. Through a cross-sectional survey in Germany where 380 teachers from different

school forms participated, Klapproth et al. (2020) explores the level of stress that teachers

perceived during the transition to distance education. The results show that teachers

experienced medium to high levels of stress. The vast majority reported technical barriers,

yet most of the teachers felt capable to cope with the stress. Whalen (2020) studied teachers’

Disruptive

teaching

practices

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