London, Ontario – The expectation on
today’s information technology
professionals to remain technically
competent constitutes a significant
source of stress.
A new study from the Richard Ivey School
of Business shows that stressed IT
professionals who use a balance of
problem-focused coping strategies and
emotion-focused coping strategies are
most successful in dealing with the
stress of staying perpetually
up-to-date.
Feeling
stressed and harried is a normal state
of affairs for many people in their
workplaces. But the reality for
information technology professionals is
even more intense as their skills are
continually depleted as opposed to
accumulating over time.
A recent
study by Hsing-Yi Tsai, Deborah Compeau
and Nicole Haggerty reveals that IT
professionals often think in terms of
“running races to keep up” or being in a
“constant battle to learn new IT
skills.”
Not all
IT professionals view this requirement
to continually re-skill themselves as a
threat, but many do. With companies
spending 1.5% to 7% of their gross
revenue each year on IT investments and
innovations; this level of investment
puts substantial pressure on IT
professionals to maintain and gain
skills to put these technologies in
place effectively.
The
study highlights the importance of
monitoring the stress that results from
the constant demand on IT professionals
to update their technical skills because
the threat of technical obsolescence may
result in a higher rate of absenteeism,
work burnout and a desire to change
careers. Managers can help by providing
IT professionals with concrete resources
such as research time, opportunities to
attend courses, and physical facilities
that facilitate trial and error.
IT
professionals who deploy different
combinations of coping strategies end up
with different levels of distress. They
fared best by using a combination of
problem-focused coping and
emotion-focused coping.
Problem-focused coping strategies:
-
Direct Action: thinking about
solutions to the problem, gathering
information about it, or actually
doing something to try to solve it.
-
Seeking Social Support: exerting
conscious effort to find (1) advice,
assistance, or information
Emotion-focused Coping Strategies:
-
Seeking Social Support: exerting
conscious effort to find (2)
sympathy or moral support.
-
Situation Redefinition: trying to
see the problem in a different light
that makes it seem more bearable.
-
Acceptance: accepting that the
problem had occurred but that
nothing could be done about it.
-
Relaxation: doing something with the
implicit intention of relaxing.
-
Distraction: diverting attention
away from the problem by thinking
about other things or engaging in
some activity.
Heavy
reliance on emotion-focused coping
strategies suggests an assessment of low
changeability of the situation. In other
words, people are more likely to use
these strategies when they believe that
nothing constructive can be done about
the stressor and that the problem is
something that they must endure.
Companies may also provide support to IT
professionals through positive framing
of technical skill updating – by framing
skills updating in a positive way such
as “theme park,” while avoiding negative
sounding words such as “boot camp.”
Companies may also wish to consider
optimism as a critical personality trait
when recruiting for IT roles that demand
intensive and constant technical skill
updating because optimists remain more
hopeful.
For
further information, please contact
Deborah Compeau at 519-661-4280,
dcompeau@ivey.uwo.ca ; Nicole
Haggerty at 519-661-4025,
nhaggerty@ivey.uwo.ca or Hsing-Yi
(Phoebe) Tsai at
ptsai@ivey.uwo.ca.
Excerpts
from “Of Races to Run and Battles to
be Won: Technical Skill Updating, Stress
and Coping of IT Professionals”
Simply possessing information technology
is an insufficient condition for
achieving the tangible outcomes in which
shareholders are interested, such as
improving the bottom line. An
organization may be committed to
deploying the latest IT but will harvest
little from its investment if the
potential of the technology is not fully
understood and realized. IT
professionals play a crucial role in
achieving these advantages because they
develop and exploit information
technology to extract value by
delivering the right technological
solution to business problems.
The (in)ability to learn and adapt to
changes quickly is thus critical for the
career of an IT professional. The demand
to constantly update their technical
skills seems to be taking its toll on
the IT workforce; turnover rates for IT
workers in the US rose to 10.2% in 2001
from 8% in 2000. One major factor
contributing to the turnover of IT
professionals is the work exhaustion
triggered by constant changes in
technology.
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