Venkatesh, V., Bala, H., and Sykes, T.A.
Production and Operations Management, 19, 2010, 591-613.

India is an important frontier for economic growth, investments, and development. Like the manufacturing industry, the service sector in India is also booming. Following the trend of their western counterparts, service organizations in India are implementing enterprise-level information and communication technologies (ICTs) to support service processes. In this paper, we used socio-technical systems theory to develop hypotheses about the effects of ICTs on the five job characteristics, i.e., skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback, as specified by the job characteristics model (JCM). We also tested the entire JCM that relates job characteristics to job satisfaction and job performance via various mediators and moderators. We conducted a 32-month long field study of 1,743 employees, with data gathered before and after an ICT implementation at a bank in India. We found that although the ICT enriched employees’ job characteristics, employees reported significantly lower job satisfaction and job performance. To understand this puzzling finding, we conducted a qualitative study and identified four contextual forces contributing to these results: environmental barriers, learning difficulty, culture shock, and employee valuation. These findings reveal factors that hinder successful implementation of ICTs in the service sector in India and possibly, other developing countries.

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