The Effect of Mutual Causality Disposition on Attitudes and Performance in an IT Organization

Abstract

Based on both Buddhist philosophy and general system theory, mutual causality disposition (MCD) was proposed as an alternative construct that can be utilized to explain and predict important organizational effectiveness, such as employee attitudes and performance. The primary purpose of this study is to examine the effect of MCD on the attitudes and performance of people working for an IT company in order to check if MCD does actually work as suggested. In this study, MCD was hypothesized to be affected by two personality traits (i.e., conscientiousness and extraversion) and has a positive effect on two attitude variables (i.e., job satisfaction and organization commitment) and three performance domains (i.e., job dedication, interpersonal facilitation, and task performance). It was also hypothesized that the effect of the personality traits on the attitudes and performance domains would be mediated by MCD. Analyses of the dataset collected from 223 IT engineers showed evidence supporting all the hypotheses except the relationship between MCD and task performance. The effect of conscientiousness on job satisfaction and job dedication was mediated by MCD-Action and MCD-communication, while that of extraversion on interpersonal facilitation and organization commitment was mediated by MCD-Relationship. Some implications of the findings and suggestions for future research were discussed.