Welcome to my blog

My articles are from various angles that might interest different audiences:

The research category includes my academic publications, opinion pieces on academia or open science or research methods tips,
The teaching category includes textbook reviews, teaching tips or resources for students and teachers in my discipline,
The fiction category has short science-fiction stories about the future of work impacted by technology,
The opinion category presents opinion pieces on work and technology and various ideas on how to apply my research.

PhD dissertation: Email Stress and Desired Email Use

28/07/2022 Research Publication, Work, Technology

This thesis is about workplace stress due to email and computer-mediated communication use. Rather than focusing on email-specific constructs such as email overload, email interruptions or email use outside working hours, it draws an overarching construct of ‘email stress’ based on previous theories of traditional workplace stress. This cross-disciplinary approach emphasizes the individually appraised nature of email stress. As a result, the thesis gives a central importance to individuals using email and, more importantly, to their desired email use. The thesis is based on a three-stage multi-method design involving quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews. The results of these studies are part of the four self-sufficient papers composing the thesis. While the papers make their own contributions, they also build on one another to advance the understanding of email stress as being a kind of stress that is individually appraised and that affects workplace well-being. The papers adapt theories of workplace stress, such as Person-Environment Fit and Cybernetics, to the study of email stress, and empirically validate these adaptations. They reveal how email stress can be the result of unfulfilled desires in terms of email use or a reason for desiring fewer emails. As employees do not often have control over their email use, the findings encourage the emergence of a more empathetic organizational culture taking into account individuals’ desires in terms of email use.

28/07/2022 Uncategorized Publication, Work, Technology

Master's thesis: Trust Formation in Virtual Teams - A Vignette Experiment on the Interplay Between Authentic Leadership and Media Richness

28/07/2022 Uncategorized Publication, Work, Technology

Master's Dissertation, submitted in September 2013 to Aston Business School for the fulfillment of my MSc in Organisational Behaviour, under the supervision of Dr LYUBOVNIKOVA Joanne. This dissertation investigates the impact of authentic leadership on trust formation and ethical decision-making in virtual teams. To do so, special attention was given to the mediating role of social identification. This is done using an online vignette experiment manipulating both authentic leadership and media richness to study their effects on trust and other outcomes. The sample consists of undergraduate business students and employees.

29/06/2022 Research Publication, Work, Technology

Publication: Web Robinson, vivre le télétravail extrême par identification narrative

29/06/2022 Research Publication, Work, Technology

En 2014, le « Web Robinson » Gauthier Toulemonde partait 40 jours télétravailler sur une île déserte, physiquement isolé mais virtuellement connecté à une communauté immergée dans ses aventures. Cet article mobilise ce cas extrême et semi-fictionnel pour comprendre les mécanismes d’identification narrative ayant permis à ses lecteurs-auditeurs-spectateurs de vivre par procuration les paradoxes de l’autonomie asservie et de l’hyperconnexion solitaire inhérents au télétravail, puis de devenir les auteurs de leurs propres récits durant la crise COVID-19.

07/04/2022 Research Publication, Work, Technology

Publication: Email Overload: Investigating Technology-fit Antecedents and Job-related Outcomes

07/04/2022 Research Publication, Work, Technology

Email is the communication application most widely used in organizations. Its use in the workplace has increased fourfold since 2006. Yet, email is associated with a number of negative aspects, most prominently ‘email overload’, defined as an individual’s perception of being overwhelmed by emails that s/he considers too numerous to handle. Email overload is a theoretically interesting phenomenon because of its adverse organizational outcomes. Moreover, it continues to be vexing in practice because it has proved intractable to manage. We problematize the current understanding of email overload as being due to lack of understanding of its technology fit-related antecedents and job-related outcomes, and then investigate how email overload is influenced by a lack of fit between the communication applications that the organization provides to individuals and those that (1) they want, and that (2) are suitable for their tasks. We hypothesize that such lack of fit leads to email by default, defined as the perception of email being used improperly, when other communication applications would be better suited. Email by default is then hypothesized to lead to email overload. We further investigate job-related outcomes of email overload. To achieve this, we conducted a two-stage, multi-method empirical study in a large manufacturing organization in a sequential research design, where the first study (qualitative-interviews) informed the second (quantitative-survey). Our results support the hypothesized relationships. The paper theoretically broadens the scholarly discourse on email overload to include novel antecedents and outcomes in the ongoing quest to establish a more complete understanding of this phenomenon.

28/10/2021 Impact, Fiction Work, Technology

Intervention aux Imaginales sur les "Imaginaires et Frontières du Travail"

28/10/2021 Impact, Fiction Work, Technology

Je suis intervenu le 15 octobre 2021 au festival des littératures de l'imaginaire "Les Imaginales".

Article in French.

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Jean-François Stich