Emergence of technostress in multi-user VR environments for work-related purposes

Abstract

The virtual reality market is growing exponentially with forecasts indicating the global virtual reality market-scale to rise by almost eighty-three percent from 2022 by 2025. Social virtual reality is the virtual environment designed to function as a communication platform—comprising of multi-user characteristics such as shared spaces, avatar-based interactions, and tools facilitating remote collaboration. Despite the use of virtual reality and social virtual reality in organizations, the research highlighting the stress experienced by the users of multi-user virtual reality environments in organizations remain sparse. To address this gap in the research, this study applies the concept of technostress. While prior literature on technostress has highlighted several stress creating conditions with severe consequences (i.e., strains) for organizational use as well as use of virtual reality and social virtual reality, very little remains known about the stress creating conditions and the emergence of technostress in users using multi-user virtual reality in a work-related setting. A qualitative analysis using the critical incident technique was employed in this paper to highlight the stress creating factors and subsequent strains due to using social virtual reality in the organizational context. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with open-ended questions to glean the experiences of the users who are active in the multi-user VR environments for work-related purposes. The study identified four stressor categories which contained various stress creating conditions relevant to the context and therefore contributing to the existing literature of technostress. The study also identifies two strain categories that emerged. Furthermore, the study discusses the common patterns between the technostressors and the subsequent strains, opening new avenues of research on this topic.