Lodewiek Jansen
Current position:
Junior Consultant at Strategy on Demand
Thesis title:
Trust and empowerment: affecting employee satisfaction and productivity of the IT related knowledge worker
Description:
In the western world, knowledge has become one of the most valued commodities in economic activities and leads to the emerge of knowledge-based economies (Drucker 1969). This leads to an increase of the importance of knowledge work and a growing number of people working as knowledge workers. One of the biggest challenges for management in the 21st – century will be to increase the knowledge workers productivity (Drucker 1999). In this thesis a model of psychological empowerment, trust, employee satisfaction and productivity was tested in the context of IT related knowledge work. Dependent variables are employee satisfaction and productivity; the independent variables are empowerment and trust. For empowerment the four dimensions of psychological empowerment from Spreitzer (1995) are used. These dimensions are empowerment meaning, empowerment competence, empowerment self-determination, and empowerment impact. The trust dimensions consist of two variables namely trust in the managers and trust in colleagues. Both variables relate to employee satisfaction comparable to the study of (Matzler and Renzl 2006).
The total sample consists of 1294 IT professionals, managers and staff of an IT service firm in the Netherlands. Most IT professionals work at the location of the client. The base model is first tested for the whole group and all expected relations were found and significant. Trust in management is the most important determent of employee satisfaction and empowerment competence has the most influence on productivity. Of the control variables only the managerial role has significant influence on the model. Hence, the model is tested separately on the IT professionals and managers yielding to different results. Empowerment self-determination is of importance for the satisfaction of the managers but not for the IT professionals. Managers’ satisfaction does not increase their productivity. Managers’ trust in colleagues does not influence their satisfaction. Most finding are inline with previous findings from Spreitzer et al. (1997) and Matzler and Renzl (2006) indicating that the model does not differ for knowledge workers and non-knowledge workers.
The influence of the contextual variables on the base model is tested. Contextual variables are managerial role, place of work and type of project since these characteristics specific to this case and might have influence on the relations in the model. Only the influence of internal work is found to influence the relations with productivity.
For the complete pdf version of this thesis click
here
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2008 - Lodewiek Jansen
