Tuesday 12 June 2012

Work Value Preferences of Information Technology Professionals in Chennai City

Work Value Preferences of Information Technology Professionals:

A Study in Chennai City


G.Suryanarayana Reddy and P.Govinda Reddy 
Management Matters, Vol.1, No.5, September 2002 

Work value preferences affect job satisfaction and job commitment. Work values are sub set of life values. Life values are intrinsic and enduring perspectives of what is fundamentally right or desirable.  Work values of employees affect corporate culture.  The knowledge of work values of information technology (I.T.) professionals will result in proper design of job attributes and selection process.

To measure work values, 28 constructs have been selected from Konrad et al. (2000). The relevance of each one of these constructs was discussed with five I.T. Professionals and a questionnaire was developed with these 28 items.  Each item is given seven responses with response one indicating “not at all important” and response seven indicating “very much important”.  The questionnaire was administrated to 107 I.T. professionals working in two different companies in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India and data were collected from them in the month of December 2001. 

The scores on the 28 constructs were factor analyzed with varimax rotation.  The factor analysis has condensed 28 constructs into eight orthogonal factors. 

1.      Professional skill development
2.      Authority and status
3.      Congenial social relationships
4.      Facilitating work environment
5.      Travel abroad
6.      Fringe benefits
7.      Job security
8.      Leisureliness in the job

The work value preferences are arranged according to values of means and standard errors. The I.T. professionals have rated the work value of professional skill development as the most important.  The next most important work value to them is job security.  Facilitating work environment, congenial social relationships, authority and status, fringe benefits, leisureliness in job and travel abroad are ordered on the basis of mean importance scores.

Z tests were conducted to test the significance of differences of mean importance scores between eight work values.  The difference in mean scores between the work values of professional skill development and job security is found to be significant at 95% confidence level (Z=3.4).  In addition, Z test indicated that professional skill development score is significantly higher in comparison to the mean scores of all other work values.  Professional skill development represents intrinsic work value.  The other seven work values represent extrinsic values.

Job security is not found to be significantly more important than facilitating work environment
(Z=0.44).  Job security is also not found to be significantly more important than congenial social relations (Z=0.82).  So, we club these three work values, namely, job security, facilitating work environment and congenial social relations as the set of work values which are second most important for the I.T. professionals.

Significant difference was found between the means of the work values of congenial social relations and authority and status (Z=2.2) at 95% confidence level.

There is no significant difference between authority between authority and status and fringe benefits (Z= 1.133).  Authority and status and fringe benefits are considered as third most important work values for the I.T. professionals.

There is no significant difference between the means of fringe benefits and leisureliness in the job (Z=1.979).  So leisureliness in the job is labeled as fourth most important work value.

There is no significant difference between the means of leisureliness in the job and travel abroad
(Z=1.884).  Travel abroad is considered as the least important work value among them.

I.T. companies shall focus on work values that are important for their employees.  Jobs in their organizations shall be designed with attributes that enhance employees’ professional skill development and that give employees job security, facilitating work environment and congenial social relationships.  The companies hall strive to match the important work values of their employees with the job attributes. Organizations shall upgrade their knowledge about the relative importance of their employees’ work values.

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