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Too much of and less than a good thing: implications for managing IT professionals

Published: 31 May 2012 Publication History

Abstract

The management of information technology (IT) professionals is an important managerial concern. The way that IT organizations manage their IT professionals is essentially manifested in their implementation of human resource management (HRM) practices, such as those related to work environment and career development opportunities, social support, compensation, and employment security. This paper briefly introduces person-environment (P-E) fit theory to explore what an IT professional wants from an employment arrangement and what is supplied by the employer. However, a criticism of P-E fit theory is that it does not specify the form of the relationship between P-E fit and other constructs, such as satisfaction and job search. In order to address this gap, the paper investigates both equity theory and prospect theory as possible explanations. Ultimately, prospect theory is used to develop illustrative hypotheses. The paper then describes the methodology that will be used to test these hypotheses. The results of the tests, when completed, will be used to suggest directions for managing IT professionals and future IT HRM theory development and testing.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGMIS-CPR '12: Proceedings of the 50th annual conference on Computers and People Research
    May 2012
    224 pages
    ISBN:9781450311106
    DOI:10.1145/2214091
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 31 May 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. equity theory
    2. person-organization fit
    3. prospect theory

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    SIGMIS-CPR '12
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    SIGMIS-CPR '12: 2012 Computers and People Research Conference
    May 31 - June 2, 2012
    Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA

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