Presentation 11. Promoting IT service employees' customer-oriented behaviors: An empirical study of an ERP support center in a healthcare enterprise

Abstract

The role of information technology (IT) employees has undergone dramatic changes over the years. In the 1960s and 1970s, IT employees were highly valued for their technical skills in managing computer operations, programming, and processing data. However, in organizations today, they are expected to be proficient in business operations, management, and interpersonal communication. This shift in skills and competence requirements of IT employees challenges them to adopt customer-oriented behaviors and to strive for excellent customer services. Service organizations, such as IT help desks and call centers, have long emphasized the importance of service quality and customer satisfaction (i.e., service effectiveness). Yet IT service employees are often evaluated on the timeliness and volume of service calls (i.e., service efficiency). Balancing the trade-off between the two performance measures — effectiveness versus efficiency — becomes a fundamental dilemma for IT executives and managers. Moreover, the increasing emphasis on customer satisfaction has blurred the boundary between in-role (expected job duties) and extra-role (discretionary) customer service behaviors in IT services. To enhance our understanding, in this article, we seek to address two questions: (1) what types of customer-oriented behaviors do IT service employees demonstrate? (2) How do customer-oriented behaviors affect an IT service employee's task efficiency? To answer our questions, we draw on the literature on organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), defined as discretionary behaviors that promote the effective functioning of an organization but not part of the formal job description. An example of OCBs would be that one team member offers to help a newcomer learn how to perform a specific team task. In our research, we focus on IT employees' discretionary behaviors directed to their business counterparts (end-users), and refer to those behaviors as customer-oriented OCBs. The study is based on our empirical investigation of an Enterprise System Support Center in a large healthcare organization that implemented two enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications — HR/Payroll Management and Supplier Relationship Management. In this article, we discuss five major types of customer-oriented OCBs — anticipation, education, justification, personalization-business, personalization-technology — in the provision of IS support services, and empirically test the association between the five types of OCBs and employees' task efficiency. Using a sample of 587 records from the support center's ticketing database, we show that an customer-oriented OCB is negatively associated with task efficiency in IS support services, but not all types of citizenship behaviors have a significant, negative effect on an IT employee's task efficiency. Among the five OCB types, the OCBs related to anticipation, justification, and personalization-technology are found to require significantly more efforts from IT employees, compared to the non-OCB instances. When support tasks are informational (i.e., information retrieval), the efforts required to perform personalization-technology OCBs become minimal. Organizations should promote the customer-oriented behaviors of their IT employees, and consider them as a promising and value-added source for enhancing effective use of organizational IS. In the meantime, it is worth noting that those customer-oriented behaviors will cost IT employees extra efforts, affecting their task efficiency. In this regard, our study urges both academia and industry practitioners to update our views of IT employees' role in organizational IS support and to promote human resource policies related to the development of IT professionals.