Does benchmarking motive or impede ICT team progress? Exploring the moderating effects of selective autonomy and benchmarking self-efficacy

• Main Authors: Pei-Shan Tu, 杜佩珊
• Other Authors: Jerry Chih-Ching Chiang
• Format: Others
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/45400113060630460950

碩士 === 國立東華大學 === 資訊管理碩士學位學程 === 103 === With the advancement and maturity of information and communication technologies (ICTs), enterprises are reinforced their investments in the information technologies (IT) and extensively rely on ICT teams to accomplish complex tasks to cope with rapid changing industrial environments. Besides, best practices and benchmarking emerged from approaches of performance appraisal to avoid learning risks and inspire employees. However, IT professionals are usually function diversity and task variaety, as well as work on boundary spanning projects that lead to the difficulty of measuring direct effects for information systems developments. Therefore, performance appraisal of IT professionals holds a critical issue constantly between both the academia and practices. Based on the contingency view, this study argues that justice perceptions of IT professionals will be the key to issues of performance appraisal rather than how to evaluate their performance. As a result, we propose a model affecting IT professionals’ justice perceptions towards their pormance based on benchmarking mechanism within ICT teams. Benchmarking research appeared to the form of case study mostly instead of empirical study in the past, hence, this study try to empirically develop the measure of benchmarking. Furthermore, research model is built to bridge the research gaps by integrating the social learning theory (SLT), social cognition theory (SCT), and affective events theory (AET). Based on the viewpoint of ICT team members, this study examines the influences of the characteristics of benchmarking on team members’ emotions and justice perceptions of performance appraisal; moreover, the moderating effects of benchmarking self-efficacy and selective autonomy are also explorered further during the period of benchmarking. Data from 159 valid respondents were collected by online survey, and partial least squares (PLS) and hierarchical regression analysis were employed to validate hypotheses. The findings indicate that the characteristics of benchmarking, especially in the factors of learning and goal setting, increase the impact of ICT members’ positive emotion, whereas the comparison factor has a negative effect on negative emotion, and in turn enhance their justice perceptions of performance appraisal. Second, the moderating effect of benchmarking self-efficacy is supported, that is, the perceptions of ICT team members vary contingently on the differences of the impact of benchmarking self-efficacy during the period of benchmarking. Finally, the justice perceptions and identification of performance appraisal can be promoted if enterprises could provide appropriate benchmark alternatives and selective autonomy for IT professionals with corresponding competencies.