Organizational control, defined as efforts to increase the chances that employees of an organization work toward achieving organizational goals, is believed to have positive effects on performance. However, few studies have tested this assumption. This research draws on theories of control and coordination to investigate the relationship between control and information systems (IS) development performance.
It consists of analyses of two research models, one at the individual level of analysis, and the other at the team level of analysis. The individual-level model investigates how control affects individual effort toward task and individual coordination success, and proposes that these relationships are moderated by controlees perceptions of how effectively a controller can monitor their work behaviors and outcomes. The team-level model investigates two mediators through which control may affect IS development performance: team effort toward task, and team coordination success. A field survey was conducted, and completed matched survey responses from 106 managers and team members involved in 36 different IS development projects were used to test the hypotheses.
The results suggest that control does have a positive relationship with effort toward task and coordination success. Specifically, clan control was positively associated with coordination success at the individual and team levels, and with team effort toward task. Outcome control was positively associated with individual effort toward task. In addition, the relationship between outcome control and individual effort toward task was moderated by team member perceptions of the difficulty of observing outcomes. At high levels of difficulty of observing outcomes, high levels of outcome control resulted in higher effort than at low levels of difficulty of observing outcomes.
Control was also positively related to performance outcomes. Behavior control was associated with reduced overruns of resources such as time, budget, and systems and programming effort. Outcome control was positively associated with product performance, which represents the quality, ease-of-use, and functionality of the system developed or enhanced by the project. Clan control was associated with both improved product performance and reduced resource overruns.
No support was found for mediation of the effects of control on performance by effort toward task or coordination success.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-09032009-095634 |
| Date | 30 September 2009 |
| Creators | Haney, Mark H |
| Contributors | Sandra A. Slaughter, John Hulland, Laurie J. Kirsch, Dennis Galletta, Jacob G. Birnberg |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-09032009-095634/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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