Effects of gender, intrinsic motivation, and user perceptions in end-user applications at work

Effects of gender, self-efficacy, ease of use, and usefulness on end-user programmers' state of flow, a form of intrinsic motivation, and task performance in carrying out spreadsheet debugging tasks were examined. Results showed that perceived ease of use was the most influential factor of intensity of flow and task performance. Conceptually, perceived ease of use embodied both an individual's perception of system's ease of use and an individual's self-efficacy. The influence of perceived ease of use and self-efficacy on the intensity of flow was in line with the flow theory in that an individual would experience a state of flow when an individual's skills were parallel to the challenge of the tasks. The higher the perception of ease of use and self-efficacy, the greater the intensity of flow experienced by end users. In other words, the perception of ease of use and self-efficacy were essential to end users' intrinsic motivation. In terms of task performance, for males, the higher their perception of the system's ease of use and self-efficacy, the better they could perform the tasks. These findings suggest that beliefs in one's ability to use the system (perceived ease of use) to carry out the tasks (self-efficacy) were mainly important in achieving successful task performance. For females, it was surprising to learn that none of the factors influenced their task performance. These findings call for future works to investigate which factors directly impact females' spreadsheet-debugging performance or mediate between the study's investigated factors and females' task performance.