Technology-induced Stressors, Job Satisfaction and Workplace Exhaustion among Journalism and Mass Communication Faculty

Teaching journalism and mass communication has become a technology-intensive occupation. Today, journalism faculty members show students how to capture still and moving images with digital cameras and how to edit those images on a computer using Photoshop, Final Cut Pro or Avid. They teach publication design with PageMaker or QuarkXPress. They demonstrate Web-page production using BBEdit, Front Page, Dreamweaver and other HTML editors. They give class presentations in PowerPoint. They teach digital information gathering using Web browsers like Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator or proprietary databases like Lexis-Nexis and Dow Jones Interactive. They tackle computer-assisted reporting projects with spreadsheets like Excel. And they stay in touch with colleagues and students via e-mail using interfaces such as Outlook or Eudora. All of this technology has a cost, of course. Journalism administrators know that because they measure the cost in dollars. Some programs report spending hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to provide digital hardware and software for their faculty and students.1 But there is another significant cost of this technology, and it's one that is not normally measured in dollars: Technology has become a significant source of stress in the work lives of those who teach journalism and mass communication. This article reports on results of a national study on the use of technology in U.S. journalism and mass communication programs. study, which involved more than 400 full-time faculty members at about 230 schools, took its inspiration from a broader survey of college educators. That survey found that for two out of three professors across a variety of disciplines, keeping up with technology led to workplace stress.2 Given the intensive use of digital hardware and software in journalism and mass communication education, it seemed likely that faculty in these programs would be experiencing significant stress, too. In the analyses below, we examine how technology-induced stress is affecting two important aspects of work-life quality: and work-related exhaustion. findings from our study - the largest of its kind to focus on technology in journalism and mass communication programs - document how tech stress is lowering and raising levels of exhaustion. findings also suggest that deleterious effects from tech stress are not inevitable. In fact, they point toward things that administrators could do to help faculty cope better in their increasingly digital working environments. Our hope is that these accommodations might minimize the negative effects that technology appears to have on the quality of work life for those who teach journalism and mass communication. Research on Job Satisfaction two central work-life concepts examined in this paper are and work-related exhaustion. Both concepts have been used widely in studies within and outside the academy. Of the two, is the more problematic. Across time, that concept has suffered from a lack of commonly accepted conceptual and operational definitions. As far back as the 1960s, scholars pointed to confusion about the concept. For example, Vroom noted that job satisfaction and job attitudes seemed to be used interchangeably since both refer to the affective orientation of the individual toward the work role he is occupying.3 Vroom is among many scholars who have offered conceptual definitions of satisfaction, though a single, widely held definition remains elusive. For instance, in their study in the 1960s, Ivancevich and Donnelly offered this definition: The favorable viewpoint of the worker toward the work role he presently occupies.4 Five years later, Carroll described as the evaluation of one's and the employing company as contributing suitably to the attainment of one's personal objectives.5 And several years after that, Kalleberg sought to clarify earlier definitions by calling it an overall affective orientation on the part of individuals toward work roles which they are presently occupying. …