Leveraging IT Capability To Improve Employee's Agility Through Perceived Task Structure And Workplace Conflict

With increasing rapidity of market changes,employee's agility is now attracting more and more scholars and manager.Employee agility refers to the capability of employees to react and adopt sudden market changes readily and appropriately.Multiple studies and research exhibit benefits of employee agility in terms of improving customer service,product quality,and organizational learning.Given the benefits of employee agility,research on its antecedents are still controversial and insufficient.Hence current thesis aim to investigate how to improve employee agility from information processing perspective.Based on information processing theory,this thesis proposes three different models for examining how employee information technology(IT)capability,perceived task structure,workplace conflict,and ESM(enterprise social media)usage relate to employee agility.Additionally,ESM is widely used by employees in the workplace for work related communication and collaboration.However,scholars and practitioners are uncertain about the benefits of ESM usage in the workplace.The current thesis also addresses this issue by investigating how the ESM usage by employees is related to his/her agility.Data were gathered from employees who utilized IT applications such as ESM for daily work routines in the workplace.Based on above the author conducts three different studies.The first study mainly investigate the mediating role of perceived task structure in the relationship between IT capability and employee agility.Amongst the research on employee agility,employee IT capability attracts more attention.Meanwhile,it is difficult to have consistent understanding on the effect of IT capability in improving employee agility.Additionally,employee agility based on knowledge sharing,task sequence,and frequent communication.Drawing on this point existing study considers perceived task structure mediates the influence of IT capability on employee agility.In addition,work expertise is also discussed in extent literature for perceived task structure.This study also aim to address this research gap by investigating the moderating role of work expertise.The present study validates most of the proposed hypotheses and moderating effects regarding IT capability and further affirms the significant role of IT capability in improving an employee's agility through perceived task structure.Work expertise fortifies the benefits of perceived task structure,which benefits the employee's agility.The second study based on information processing model,aiming to investigate the influence of workplace conflict on employee's agility.Among the potential influencing factors,workplace conflict attracts more interests as well as disputes.However,research findings related to workplace conflict are controversial.To address this research gap author investigated the relationship between workplace conflict and the agility of employees in firms which adopts ESM.Based on the information processing perspective,this study proposes a model to examine how task conflict and relationship conflict are related to employee's agility and how ESM moderates these relationships.The role of ESM in moderating the impact of workplace conflict is complicated and,given its prevalence,it is imperative to explore the role of ESM usage in the relationship between workplace conflict and employee agility.Therefore,aim of this study is to investigate this research gap.The results of current study show that relationship conflict has a U-shaped curvilinear relationship with employee agility.Conversely,the association between task conflict and employee agility has an inverted U-shaped relationship.Moreover,the link between task conflict and employee agility is moderated by ESM usage,such that the curvilinear relationship is weakened by ESM usage.Third study,explore the relationship between ESM usage and employee agility.ESM is a digital platform which is based on Web 2.0 that allows employees to communicate with each other and broadcast messages within organizations.However,research findings on ESM usage and employee work performance yielded mixed.In study 3,author address the issue of employee's agility by investigating how the ESM use of employees is related to his/her agility,the moderating roles of IT capability and work expertise are included on the basis of information processing theory.Results confirm the positive role of ESM usage in improving agility.Work expertise strengthens the benefits of ESM,whereas IT capability generates the insignificant moderating effect.Current thesis based on literature review,field investigation and empirical analysis as a research methodology.The literature analysis focusses on the review of existing studies on employee agility and ESM usage,aiming to acquire a comprehensive interpretation to the cutting edge of the present relevant literature as well as to identify the research gap in current studies.After deciding research questions,author firstly acquires the information about the employee agility and its influencing factors.In the stage of data analysis,the author used several statistical methods to conform the validity and reliability of data,and examine hypothesis with regression analysis test.The current thesis examine the influencing factors of employee agility and also provides suggestions for managers based on information processing theory in several ways.First,this thesis addresses an important but overlooked topic-how to improve employee agility to realize effective responses to market changes.The author conducts logical literature analysis of the concept of employee agillity and disclose its influencing factors including IT capability and ESM usage.All three studies in this thesis addresses these factors,and their important role in developing employee agility.Second,this thesis investigates the several factors to investigate the influencing factors of employee agility,in order to provide diverse suggestions for managers.In first study,author focuses on employee agility with the relationship of perceived task structure and IT capability.In second study,the author extends the insight to investigate the influences of workplace conflict on employee agility.Finally,author investigates the influence of emerging technology such as ESM usage on employee agility.From multiple studies,this thesis provides evidence to deeper understanding of the backgrounds of employee agility.Third,current thesis examines the moderating effect of several influencing factors.Developing employee agility is a complex process,which requires consideration of several factors.The author purpose to provide prudent conclusions on this topic by considering boundary conditions in this developing process.Drawing on this,current thesis considers work expertise,ESM usage,and IT capability as moderators.The exploration to boundary conditions not only improves the existing theoretical knowledge,but also proposes the several suggestions for the managers.