One Size Does Not Fit All: Managing IT Employees' Employment Arrangements

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Fall 2007

Publication Source

Human Resource Management

Abstract

As alternative employment arrangements proliferate within the information technology (IT) function, it becomes increasingly important to understand the impact of these arrangements on IT employees. A prevalent notion in the IT literature is that these employees are homogeneous in their work values and that they prefer similar employment arrangements. Given the inefficiency of designing individual employment programs, we advocate a middle ground between the two extremes of individualized employment arrangements and “one size fits all.” We conducted two studies. The first study developed an individual's work values profile as a psychological construct. It used a national sample of IT employees to validate a simple, heuristic procedure that was successful in classifying about 80% of the sample into three work values profiles.The second study demonstrated the use of work values profiles for understanding how employment arrangements differentially influence employee satisfaction. It applied the validated procedure to a single organization in order to demonstrate the general applicability of the procedure and to show that it provides researchers and HR professionals with better insights than the assumption that all IT employees are alike.

Inclusive pages

349-372

ISBN/ISSN

0090-4848

Comments

Permission documentation on file.

Publisher

John Wiley & Sons

Volume

46

Issue

3

Peer Reviewed

yes

Link to Full Text

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