Data-Intensive Research & Scientific Discovery

The roles of information technology (IT) professionals have expanded from technical staff into service providers. However, IT professionals are usually better trained in dealing with computers instead of how to interact with human being. The attitude and behavior of IT professionals’ service orientation, that is the ability of service employees to help their customers, affects the service quality of information system as well as IT projects. This study is to identify the personal and environmental factors affecting service orientation in IT service provision. Results showed that IT professional’s work locus of control, which is the personal factor, and organizational service climate, which is the environment factor significantly affect IT professionals’ service orientation attitudes and behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications of this study are to be discussed in the conference.

Introduction Goal of the Research Numerous researchers have indicated that a particular piece of misinformation, the perception of Information Technology (IT) professionals as being geeks and loners, may be one of many explanations for the under-representation of women in Information Technology. In particular, Jepson and Perl (2002) identified a nerdy image of IT people as one of six reasons that girls do not choose IT careers. Hazzan and Levy (2006) identified a geeky and loner image as one of three factors discouraging women from IT careers, positing that women are more likely to be interested in careers involving more interaction with people. Margolis and Fisher (2002) suggested that women are more likely to be affected by the geek stereotype than men are, and thus, when women do not experience an intense obsession with computers, they are more likely to contemplate whether they really belong in the IT field. Eglash (2002) described the geek identity as not only a gender but also a race concern that acts as a gatekeeper and paradox in the participation of science and technology as it potentially hinders diversity. The purpose of this research was to determine if girls in the United States, ages sixteen through eighteen, at the age when they are making university and career choices, do indeed view IT professionals in this negative way. Significance of the Issue The geek/loner issue is important for multiple reasons. The predicted growth of IT jobs in the United States (Hecker, 2005), the shortage of IT professionals (McGee, 2005), and the under-representation of women in the IT field have raised serious concern regarding the US technology workforce in the 21st century (Camp, 1997; Grant, Knight, & Steinbach, 2006; Holzer, 2006; Lazowska, 2002; Sanders, 2005). According to the employment outlook for 2004-2014 by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (Hecker, 2005), and mathematical science occupations are projected to increase 30.7 percent, an additional 967,000 jobs. Of the 30 fastest-growing occupations during this time, six are in computer-related disciplines: network systems and communications analysts, application software engineers, systems software engineers, network and systems administrators, database administrators, and systems analysts. A 2005 study by the Society for Information Management (cited in McGee, 2005) lists critical shortages in IT project management and business domain experts for 2005-2008. McGee (2005) cites two reasons for the shortage of IT professionals. A 10 percent decline from 10 or 15 years ago in the number of students majoring in technology-related degrees has been estimated. Some universities report upwards of a 50 percent decrease in enrollment in these degrees. As baby-boomer professionals begin retiring, an expertise shortage will exacerbate the situation. There has been an 18.5 percent decline in the percentage of women in the IT workforce since 1996 (Information Technology Association of America, 2005). Women composed 32.4 percent of the total IT workforce in 2004. A third of these women are in administrative occupations such as data entry keyer and computer operator. If these administrative occupations are removed from the calculations, women IT professionals and managers fall to 24.9 percent, virtually the same percentage as in 2002. Over the past two decades, the number of young women in the US pursuing careers in Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) has significantly decreased. The National Center of Educational Statistics (2005) reported that in 1984, 32,439 undergraduate students received bachelor's degrees in CIS. Men represented 20,416 of the total (63 percent), while women were 12,023 (37 percent). However, in 2004, 59,488 students received their bachelor's degrees in CIS of which 44,585 (75 percent) were men and 14,903 (25 percent) were women. Thus, the percentage of CIS majors who are female has dropped from 37 percent in 1984 to just 25 percent in 2004. …

The ethical integrity and accountability of Information Technology (IT) professionals is important given our reliance on various forms of IT. We examined the applicability of Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of Cognitive Moral Development (CMD) in non-Western contexts by investigating the ethical values of IT professionals in Asia’s two largest economies. Analysis of survey data from Japan (n=289) and China (n=290) indicates support for the basic six-stage model of CMD. The concept of abiding by universal laws and rules (termed stage 4 reasoning by Kohlberg) was widely accepted by IT professionals in both Japan and China, despite the Confucian cultural emphasis on personal relationships with particularistic obligations. However, differences between Japanese and Chinese IT professionals were found while, in direct contrast with the stage-wise theory of CMD, the respondents from Japan and especially China exhibited significant volatility, reasoning at different stages simultaneously. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed.

Background: Cervical radiculopathy, commonly called a “pinched nerve,” occurs when a nerve in the neck is irritated or compressed where it branches away from the spinal cord concerning particular neurologic and musculoskeletal conditions in the neck and upper limbs. Fifty-nine percent of work-related musculoskeletal disorders are reported annually by information technology (IT) professionals, among which 30% are neck pain-related disorders. Thus, this study aims to know the prevalence of cervical radiculopathy among IT professionals with neck pain. Aims: The aim of this study was to find out the prevalence of cervical radiculopathy among IT professionals with neck pain. Objectives: The objective of this study was to establish the relationship between cervical radiculopathy and neck pain and to find out the percentage of disability by using the Neck Disability Index (NDI). Materials and Methods: The prevalence study was carried out with a sample size (n = 92) involving IT professionals in Bangalore. The NDI questionnaire (NDI) related to daily life activities was used. To identify cervical radiculopathy, specialized testing was performed. Results: Out of 92 samples, 46 tested positive for cervical radiculopathy, showing a prevalence of 50%. Cervical radiculopathy was more prevalent among males than females. There was a difference (P < 0.05) in neck disability according to a special test. Conclusion: This study provides evidence for the prevalence of cervical radiculopathy among IT professionals with neck pain with a positive correlation with gender and working hours per day.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of stressors (role ambiguity, role conflict, work‐overload, work‐family conflict), job stress, job satisfaction and organizational commitment on the information technology (IT) professionals' intention to quit their jobs in Turkey.Design/methodology/approachA structural equation modeling approach was employed to identify the variables that significantly affect the decision to quit. Using LISREL 8.54, data collected from 204 IT professionals were used to test the proposed research model.FindingsThe results revealed that intention to quit one's job is explained by job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Besides, role ambiguity and job stress exert negative indirect effects on the intention to quit one's job. Additionally, organizational commitment is strongly explained by job satisfaction, and job satisfaction is predicted by role ambiguity and job stress.Practical implicationsThe study offers several significant suggestions for the continuity of IT professionals in companies.Originality/valueThere are two contributions of this paper. First, this study provides evidence for the impact of stressors, job stress, job satisfaction and organizational commitment on intention to quit jobs among IT professionals in Turkey. Second, it also provides insight into the importance of stress factors by dividing the stressors into specific stress factors such as work‐family conflict, work‐overload, role conflict, and role ambiguity.

It is seen that information technology (IT) professionals are at higher risk of developing mechanical low back pain due to numerous factors such as a sedentary lifestyle, attaining inappropriate posture for a prolonged period of time, work stresses, and inadequate exercise which lead to overload on the back musculature. Working from home has become the new normal for these professionals in which they attain abnormal posture which leads to pressure on the muscles and thus there is a need to estimate and analyze spinal muscle performance among IT professionals. Our main objectives were to estimate the spinal muscle performance in work-from-home IT professionals of Karad and to find the association between spinal muscle performance with respect to age, gender, and body mass index (BMI). Depending on inclusion and exclusion criteria, 120 IT professionals working from home were selected for this study by simple random sampling. Written consent was taken and a detailed outcome assessment was done by using the static and dynamic abdominal test, extensor test, internal/external oblique test, and back rotators test. Also, functional performance was measured using the back performance scale. SPSS version 20 was used to carry out the analysis of data and results were obtained. In participants of sample size 120 (100%), 27 (26%) were normal, 30 (32%) good, 24 (20%) fair, 21 (14%) poor, 18 (8%) trace; whereas, static extensor strength was 16 (12%) normal, 9 (18%) good, 24 (28%) fair, 18 (36%) poor, 3 (6%) trace. For oblique's, static strength was 10 (20%) normal, 12 (24%) good, 15 (30%) fair, 9 (18%) poor, 4 (8%) trace; whereas, for back rotators strength was 10 (20%) normal, 17 (34%) good, 15 (30%) fair, 8 (16%) poor. The mean number of repetitions for the dynamic endurance test for extensors was 11, for abdominals wase 24 and for obliques was 12. A back performance scale was found with a minimum score of 6 and a maximum score of 11 for activity limitation. There was statistically significant found to be between spinal muscle performance and age (P = 0.041), BMI (P = 0.027). In this study it was found that spinal muscle performance was decreased in IT professionals. It was concluded that there was a significant reduction in static extensor performance compared to static abdominal muscle performance. Also, the spinal muscle performance of extensors was less as compared to that of abdominals. The data also revealed that there was a remarkable association that was seen between spinal muscle performance and age as well as spinal performance and BMI.

Features of technology and its linkages with turnover intention and work exhaustion among IT professionals: A multi-study investigation

PurposeThis study examined how six institutionalized socialization tactics affect a particular occupation of knowledge workers – information technology (IT) professionals' role adjustment (role conflict and role ambiguity) and organizational attachment variables (job satisfaction, affective commitment, continuance commitment and intention to quit).Design/methodology/approachThe research model and hypotheses were tested using path analysis techniques with survey data collected from 187 recently hired IT professionals.FindingsThe results showed that the six socialization tactics affected IT professionals differently. Socialization tactics that recognize employees' values and skills (investiture tactics) and that emphasize the interpersonal and mentoring aspects (serial tactics) had the most significant effects on employees' role adjustment and organizational attachment. The study also revealed complex mediating relationships among socialization tactics, role adjustment and organizational attachment variables.Originality/valueThis study provides new insights about the differential effects of the various socialization tactics on IT professionals' role adjustment and organizational attachment. It also sheds light on the complex mediating relationships among socialization tactics, role adjustment and organizational attachment variables. Without considering the logical relationships between the various variables, studies examining the direct effects of socialization on isolated organizational outcome variables may overlook important linkages that are critical for explaining the inconsistent results in past empirical studies.

This study explores the different aspects of organisational commitment and its determinants for Information Technology (IT) professionals. IT-dependent companies should consider organisational commitment and ensure that relevant issues are properly addressed in their human resource strategies. The study employs Meyer and Allen’s approach to develop a new instrument to measure organisational commitment and its determinants. They defined three dimensions: Affective, continuance and normative commitment. The study covered IT professionals in Turkish private banks. Results showed that affective commitment is higher among IT professionals than the other types of commitment meaning that they work in their organisations because they want to.

The increasing need for adaptive e-learning systems among information technology (IT) professionals highlights the need for intelligent performance analysis framework for handling complex and high-dimensional data. Thus, this research introduced a deep learning based model for analyzing the performance of IT professionals in adaptive e-learning scenario. Initially, the data acquisition is employed based on behavioral, interactional and assessment metrics. The gathered data are preprocessed using noise elimination based on redundant data removal, K-nearest neighbor based imputation for handling missing values and synthetic minority oversampling technique for balancing class distribution across performance levels. Then, to reduce dimensionality and enhance learning efficiency, ensemble-based feature selection approach is devised using symmetric uncertainty, mutual information, F-Score, Gini Index, and Chi-Square. The chosen features are utilized by the proposed attention based cascaded shuffle long term dependent network (ACLNet) model for analyzing the performance of the IT professionals. The proposed model is optimized using the chaotic football team training (ChF2T) algorithm for enhancing the convergence and generalization by integrating chaotic dynamics into the parameter search process. The proposed ChF2T-ACLNet method acquired the accuracy, precision, recall, F-score, Kappa, and computation time of 98.9%, 99.1%, 98.7%, 98.4%, 0.985, and 175 s respectively.

In the present study, we examine crossover - the transmission of stress and strain from one spouse to another - in a sample of 78 information technology (IT) professionals and their working spouses. This research places crossover within the role theory framework via work-home interference (WHI) and home-work interference (HWI). The research design was cross-sectional and used self-report data. Results of hierarchical regression analysis indicated the following: (H1) For IT professionals, WHI was directly linked to work-related outcomes (i.e., burnout, health complaints); (H2) Crossover effects were found between the partner HWI and the exhaustion of the IT professional. For IT professionals, negative affectivity was significantly associated with exhaustion and cynicism, whereas for the spouse, negative affectivity was significantly associated with exhaustion and turnover intentions. The relevance of these findings to crossover research is discussed.

The expectation on today's information technology (IT) professionals to remain technically competent constitutes a significant source of stress. We examine how IT professionals experience and cope with the threat of technical obsolescence. Interestingly, not all IT professionals consider technology change a threat to their technical competence; some viewed updating as enjoyable and pursued learning for its own sake. However, most viewed the relentless demand to update their technical skills as stressful and used a variety of coping strategies to address this threat. Using this cognitive approach to technical obsolescence, we describe implications for managerial practice and delineate a direction for future research. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

DESCRIPTION The communication demands expected of today’s engineers and information technology professionals immersed in multicultural global enterprises are unsurpassed. New Media Communication Skills for Engineers and IT Professionals: Trans-National and Trans-Cultural Demands provides new and experienced practitioners, academics, employers, researchers, and students with international examples of best practices in new, as well as traditional, communication skills in increasingly trans-cultural, digitalized, hypertext environments. This book will be a valuable addition to the existing literature and resources in communication skills in both organizational and higher educational settings, giving readers comprehensive insights into the proficient use of a broad range of communication critical for effective professional participation in the globalized and digitized communication environments that characterize current engineering and IT workplaces. The communication demands expected of today’s engineers and information technology (IT) professionals immersed in multicultural global enterprises are unsurpassed. Effective workplace and professional participation does not merely ask but demands proficiency in varied multi-media rich communication skills. Global industries, markets, and professional organisations require graduates who, in order to be work ready, need to be equipped with excellent written and oral communications skills, to be multi-literate in various digital, verbal and written modes of communication, as a baseline rather than optional extra capability. Trans-cultural multi-modal communication skills, now imbued with immense significance, are allied as a powerful and crucial determinant capability highly sought in trans-national and trans-cultural workplaces and professional communities. In the highly multicultural universities and colleges, the development of these skills among both faculty and students also has a direct impact on student learning outcomes as well as on the overall quality and content of educational programs. The acquisition of expertise in transcultural, multi-modal communication skills will greatly enhance the ability of students to apply and transfer their learning into their professional practices in increasingly globalised and demanding workplace settings. However, research indicates a paucity of literature on the types of communication skills increasingly demanded and practiced in 21st century engineering and technology workplaces. Moreover, most of the literature on communication skills that is available is generic in nature, and by aiming at the higher education sector in general, ignores the specific requirements and contexts of the engineering and IT communities of practice. These points to the urgent need to close the performance gap in basic, let alone more sophisticated and technologically enabled communication skills for the engineering and IT professions. Therefore, current evidence points to a distinct need for a comprehensive resource for the learning of traditional as well as new 21st Century, new paradigm digital and trans-cultural communication skills in both workplace and educational settings in engineering and Information Technology. PREFACE The overall objective of this book is to provide a comprehensive resource for new and experienced professionals, as well as students and faculties/academics. All are stakeholders who have to come to grips with new communicative practices in increasingly trans-national, trans-cultural, and digitally-rich contexts. In doing so, the book aims to provide new and experienced practitioners, academics, employers, researchers, and students with international examples of best practices in new as well as traditional communication skills in increasingly trans-cultural, digitalised, hypertext environments. The book consists of 11 scholarly chapter contributions on diverse issues and trends in new media communication skills for engineers and IT professionals. This book will be a valuable addition to the existing literature and resources in communication skills in both organizational and higher educational settings. The book intends to incorporate the views of a wide range of stakeholders: practitioners, professionals, academics, and students. The intention is to give readers comprehensive insights into the proficient use of a broad range of communication skills and tools critical for effective professional participation in the globalised and digitised communication environments that characterise current engineering and IT workplaces.

This study investigates the pressure factors that most affect information technology (IT) professionals and their influence on their career commitment, as well as the willingness to abandon it. The following scales were used: Pressure Factors at Work adapted from the Occupational Stress Indicator (OSI), proposed by Cooper, Sloan and Williams (1988), Career Commitment, proposed by Blau (1985) and Propensity to Abandon Career, in a sample of 413 professionals. The results indicate that 73% of the surveyed professionals perceive high pressure in their daily routine, especially with respect to indicators that evaluate the relationship between professional and personal life, workload and the prospect of career growth. A negative correlation, although not very high, was found between perceived pressure and career commitment, explaining the fact that 48% of the respondents showed high commitment to the career, in spite of the high load pressure at work. IT professionals, consider abandoning the career, due to the high pressure, but eventually choose to just change job or company, given their commitment to the career and also the favorable conditions, in terms of labor market . It was also identified that IT professionals tend to use the planning of their activities as a strategy to deal with pressure at work.

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this research is to investigate the similarities and differences in Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) of male and female information technology (IT) professionals in Poland and Germany, which represent a transition economy and a developed economy, respectively. We examined two dimensions of OCB: individually-oriented (OCBI) and organizationally-oriented (OCBO). We conducted an online survey among 282 Polish respondents and 80 German respondents, using a combination of random and snowball sampling. We observed both similarities and differences between Polish and German IT professionals. Overall, female subordinates evaluated their supervisors’ OCB more positively than did male subordinates. In contrast, female supervisors evaluated their subordinates’ OCB less positively than did male supervisors. Also, it was evident that in Germany employees value OCB more than those in Poland. In conclusion, our findings contribute to the stream of existing research on the relationship between gender, country and OCB in transition and developed economies in Europe.