Conclusions and Managerial Implications

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When interpreting and drawing implications based on these empirical results, one must be aware of the study's limitations. It must be remembered that the data used to test the theoretical model and hypotheses were drawn from a single organization concerning a single computer-based system. While the results are appropriate for this organization and system, it is not necessarily the case in other settings. Additional studies across organizations and different systems are required to be able to reach more general conclusions and implications regarding these hypothesized interrelationships. Within these limitations, the following conclusions and implications are presented.

The consequences of strong employee commitment to the organization have implications for individuals and work groups as well as the organization as a whole. At the individual level, organizational commitment has been found to result in greater effort at work, reduced absenteeism, turnover, and tardiness (Mowday et. al, 1982). For example, Mowday et al. (1982) found that the level of commitment among branch bank employees was related to higher levels of performance. Several other studies also indicate that organizations composed of highly committed employees benefit through members' extra efforts in pursuit of organizational goals, greater commitment to the organization's mission and goals, lower levels of turnover, absenteeism, and tardiness (Angle & Perry, 1981; Tomer, 1998).

Given the desirable impacts of having highly committed employees, a key question is how can organizations improve the organizational commitment of its employees? Knowledge of the antecedents to organizational commitment enables organizations to manage these behaviors and attitudes of employees (Colbert and Kwon, 2000). There are cases reported in the literature establishing links between individual and organizational variables to organizational commitment. For example, Morris, Shinn & DuMont (1999) found that management support (e.g., computer staff support) impacted organizational commitment. Importantly, the research presented above focused not only on these antecedents, but the causal process by which these variables influence organizational commitment. Using the theoretical model, improvements in organizational commitment are accomplished through manipulating the controllable antecedents to computer self-efficacy and outcome expectancy, and ultimately impacting organizational commitment.

The theoretically proposed and empirically found linkages between organizational commitment and both computer self-efficacy and outcome expectancy are consistent with results reported in the literature. For example, while studying healthcare employees, O'Neill & Mone (1998) indicated that a relationship exists between self-efficacy and organizational commitment. Similarly, in a study of U.S. Army soldiers, Jex & Bliese (1999) identified collective efficacy as a moderator of a relationship between task significance and organizational commitment. McNeese-Smith (2001) found that, in a healthcare environment, one outcome expectancy measure for nurses (i.e., patient care) was related to organizational commitment.

Using these empirical results, there are several approaches to increase an employee's commitment to the organization. Hiring employees with computer experiences similar to those needed by their current organization and providing additional experiences through a high degree of system use improve the employee's organizational commitment through increasing the employee's computer self-efficacy and outcome expectancy. In the design process for the development of computer systems, making sure that these systems are easy to use improves the organizational commitment of employees through positively impacting their outcome expectancy. Similarly, providing support for the computer system and its users increases these employees' outcome expectancy and ultimately organizational commitment. In other words, easy to use systems and/or providing system support help users identify the desirable outcomes from system use. This, in turn, leads to an increase in organizational commitment.



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Advanced Topics in End User Computing (Vol. 3)
Advanced Topics in End User Computing, Vol. 3
ISBN: 1591402573
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 191

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