As telecommuting programs proliferate, a better understanding of the relationship between telecommuting and career success outcomes is required to provide human resources managers, telecommuters, and information systems managers with information to decide the future of telecommuting arrangements. This paper addresses this need by exploring whether turnover intentions and their determinants differ for telecommuters and non-telecommuters. Four hundred salespeople from one large company in the southeastern United States were asked to participate in the study. The organization entry point was the marketing director. One hundred and four telecommuting employees and one hundred and twenty-one regular employees responded, with a total of 225 usable questionnaires. Telecommuters seemed to face less role conflict and role ambiguity and tended to be happier with their supervisors and more committed to their organizations. They also showed lower satisfaction with peers and with promotion. Based on the results, recommendations are proposed for managing the implementation of telecommuting programs and their impact on the rest of the organization's employee population.
Past MIS research has indicated a mixed relationship between user participation and user satisfaction with system development projects, suggesting that user participation is not equally effective in all situations. This has led researchers to investigate the contexts within which user participation can be used to improve user satisfaction. This study builds on this past body of research by examining the relationship between specific user participative behaviors and user satisfaction in different contextual situations in order to identify the most successful participative behaviors. To do this, data were collected from 151 independent system development projects in eight different organizations. The context of development was described by two factors--task complexity and system complexity. As suggested in the literature, the combination of these two contextual factors determine the need for user participation. The relationship between specific participative behaviors and user satisfaction was then examined where the need for participation was high and those results were compared with situations with a lower need for participation. Not all participative behaviors were equally effective in all situations. Depending on the level of task complexity and system complexity, some user participative behaviors resulted in improved user satisfaction, while others had no relationship with satisfaction. The results add to earlier studies by identifying those specific user participative behaviors most beneficial under different contexts. The implications apply to both practitioners involved in the development of systems and academicians seeking to explain where and how user participation should be used. Strategies based on the results are suggested for the most appropriate involvement for users during system development.
A comprehensive list of ten major expert systems (ES) related factors likely to affect users' jobs has been defined, including problem importance, problem difficulty, developer skill, domain expert quality, user characteristics, user satisfaction, shell quality, user involvement, management support. and system usage. Impact on the job has been defined in terms of eleven items dealing with changes in job importance, amount of work, accuracy requirements, skills needed, job appeal, feed-back about performance, freedom in how to do the job, opportunity for advancement, job security, relation with peers, and job satisfaction. Data were collected on sixty-nine expert systems developed through IBM's Corporate Manufacturing Expert Systems Project Center in San Jose, California. The results show that the major variables having the most impact on users' jobs are problem importance, problem difficulty, domain expert quality, user satisfaction with the ES. shell quality, and user involvement in ES development. Based on the results, recommendations are made for corporate and ES development managers to increase the likelihood that ES will have a desirable impact on users' jobs.
As the widespread use and company dependency on expert systems (ES) increase, so does the need to assess their value and to ensure implementation success. This study identifies and empirically tests eight major variables proposed in the literature as determinants of ES success, in this case measured in terms of user satisfaction. IBM'S Corporate Manufacturing Expert Systems Project Center collected information from 69 project managers to support the study. The results clearly support the hypothesized relationships and suggest the need for ES project managers to pay special attention to these determinants of ES implementation success. ES success is directly related to the quality of developers and the ES shells used, end-user characteristics, and degree of user involvement in ES development, as each has been defined in this study. For exploratory purposes, the component items for each of these major variables were correlated with the components of user satisfaction. Based on the results, several recommendations are proposed for ES project managers to enhance the likelihood of project success, including: adding problem difficulty as a criterion for ES application selection; increasing ES developer training to improve people skills, having the ability to model and use a systems approach in solving business problems; shaping end-user attitudes and expectations regarding ES; improving the selection of domain experts; more thoroughly understanding the ES impact on end-user jobs; restricting the acquisition of ES shells based on a proposed set of criteria; and ensuring a proper match of ES development techniques and tools to the business problem at hand.
User participation has been widely touted by the MIS community as a means to improve user satisfaction within systems development. This claim, however, has not been consistently substantiated in the empirical literature. In seeking to explain such equivocal results, the effects of four contingency factors-task complexity, system complexity, user influence, and user- developer communication-on the relationship between user participation and user satisfaction were investigated. As suggested in the literature, this research tests hypotheses that these specific contingency factors should aid in identifying situations where user participation would have a strong relationship with satisfaction. Analysis of 151 independent systems development projects in eight different organizations indicated that user participation has a direct relationship with user satisfaction. In addition, the four contingency factors were found to play key roles on this relationship. Task complexity and system complexity proved to be pure moderators. That is, the strength of the participation-satisfaction relationship depended on the level of these factors. In projects where there was a high level of task complexity or system complexity, the relationship between user participation and user satisfaction was significantly stronger than in projects where task complexity or system complexity was low. User influence and user-developer communication were shown to be independent predictors of user satisfaction. That is, user influence, or user-developer communication, was positively related to user satisfaction regardless of the level of participation. The results help explain the relationship between user participation and user satisfaction by suggesting the nature of the relationship under different sets of conditions. The implications are relevant to systems developers and to academicians seeking to explain how, when, why, and where user participation is needed.
Personnel is one of the most important resources for the performance of Information Systems (IS) and Information Center (IC) organizations. The scarcity of new employees, the difficulty of training and a high turnover make personnel management in these areas a difficult problem. For IS employees, the relationships between job satisfaction, organizational commitment and intention to leave the organization have been established. Because the size of the investment and the number of organizations establishing IC organizations are growing dramatically, it has become important to understand the determinants of turnover intentions for IC as well as IS employees. Are IC employees similar to their IS counterparts? Or, is their nature basically different, as some studies have suggested? This study examines the differences between IS and IC employees in terms of demographic characteristics, participation on boundary spanning activities, role stressors, overall job satisfaction, organizational commitment and turnover intentions. The differences are found to be significant and call for special attention from IC managers to manage more properly their personnel resources. IC employees were found to participate more extensively in boundary spanning activities, experienced more role stressors (role ambiguity and role conflict), were less satisfied with their jobs and less committed to their organization. The findings also demonstrate the importance of organizational commitment as an intervening variable in models of turnover. While overall job satisfaction had both direct and indirect effects on turnover intentions among IC employees, for IS personnel it had only indirect effects through organizational commitment. The effects of role stressors and boundary spanning activities were found to be indirect via overall job satisfaction and organizational commitment for both IC and IS employees. The implications of these findings for practicing managers and for future research are discussed.
Tills article reports the findings of a field study of personal computing in 173 U.S. companies. It identifies trends over the last five years in the use of personal computing as well as the corporate MIS departments' roles, policies, and practices with regard to personal computing. A prioritized checklist of personal computing problems shows lack of user education, lack of a company-wide perspective on the use of personal computers, and overwhelming demands on MIS departments at the top in terms of problem intensity. This article reports on a field study of personal computing trends and problems in a cross-section of U.S. businesses. Previous studies have provided snapshot views of the state of personal computing at specific points in time, usually using a case study approach [e.g., 7]; have compared personal computing with mainframe-based end-user computing, emphasizing differences in the types of users and applications [1]; or have examined the role of corporate MIS in managing end-user computing in general [1, 9] and personal computing in particular [4, 5, 6]. This study tracks trends in several aspects of personal computing over the last five years in addition to developing a checklist of personal computing problems. It is felt that the approach used in this study leads to a better understanding of the process of adoption and the evolution of personal computing as providing a clearer focus on the most crucial personal computing problems.