Research Article
A Study on the Effect of Mobile Work Support Systems and Manager Leadership on Mobile Work Performance through Psychological Empowerment
1 Yonsei University
Published: January 2009 · Vol. 38 No. 5 · pp. 1135-1163
Full Text
Abstract
In the globalized world mobile work is getting ever more common in spatially decentralized organizations that are dependent on computer mediated communication(CMC). Also, mobilization of the workforce is demanding new mobile and wireless technologies to facilitate contact between the growing number of mobile workers and organizations. Recently, mobile devices like smartphone and netbook with wireless internet functions have been widely adopted by organizations designing more flexible work environments. Previous research related with mobile work shows some positive consequences of mobile work adoption by introducing successful business cases. They, however, also reveals the mobile workers’ feeling of isolation and managers’ fear about their losing control over less visible employees as the critical barriers against the rapid assimilation of mobile work in the organizations. This research, therefore, attempts to investigate (1) how the mobile workers’ expectationconfirmation level of mobile work support systems characterized with groupware and ubiquitous support can influence the perceived usefulness and satisfaction of mobile workers, (2) how the managers’ transformational leadership can affect mobile workers’ psychological empowerment, and (3) how such mobile workers’ expectation-confirmation factor of information systems and managers’ transformational leadership can eventually influence mobile workers’ task performance through the mediating variables like mobile workers’ systems satisfaction, their perceived level of empowerment and their job satisfaction. A survey has been administrated to 450 mobile workers who are currently using mobile devices like PDA in 15 organizations, and we received 391 responses. While discarding unusable reponses, 286 data have been used for analysis. The research instrument was validated using confirmatory factor analysis, and a path analysis was performed using PLS Graph 3.0 to examine the proposed research model. Results show that (1) the mobile workers’ expectation-confirmation level of mobile work support systems show positive impacts on perceived usefulness and systems satisfaction, and it after all contributes their job performance. (2) the transformational leadership shows positive impacts on mobile workers’ perceived level of their psychological empowerment, which is also positively influenced by perceived usefulness and satisfaction of mobile work support systems. (3) mobile workers’ systems satisfaction and their job satisfaction show some positive impacts on the customer-centric activities, such as increase in customer retention or better management of customer data. But, the level of their empowerment does not have direct impact on their customer-centric work performance.
