Is Organizational Commitment to IT Good for Employees? The Role of Industry Dynamism and Concentration

Engelen, Andreas; Rieger, Verena; Wehner, Marius C.; Heidemann, Fabian

Abstract

While research on the consequences of organizational commitment to IT has focused on outcomes of interest to shareholders, such as profitability and firm value, recent research has also considered other stakeholders that might benefit from an increased organizational commitment to IT, especially customers. We extend this line of the literature by investigating the benefits of a firm’s organizational commitment to IT for firms’ employees, a stakeholder group that uses and depends heavily on IT in its daily work. This exploratory study links a firm’s organizational commitment to IT with the nonmonetary employee metrics of job satisfaction and work-life balance and embeds these associations in the industry’s dynamism and concentration. We test our research model with a multi-industry dataset of 523 firms from the S&P 500 (2008-2017 period). Our findings indicate that an organizational commitment to IT may facilitate job satisfaction and work-life balance but only when industry dynamism and industry concentration are low. Additional analyses show that IT commitment’s influence on these outcomes depends on the firm’s commitment to particular IT technologies; for instance, organizational commitments to cloud technology and remote technology are particularly positively associated with work-life balance.