The Influence of Computer Usage on Employees and Managers' Satisfaction: Findings from the Australian Telecommunications

The impact of computer usage on job attitudes is an area of keen academic and professional interests. Despite much research scrutiny, it remains difficult to identify differences in end users' satisfaction that might be explained by variations in individual/job characteristics and patterns of computer usage. This article reports on the findings of a survey of 1300 employees from the Australian Telecommunications Industry and examines the impact of computer usage on job satisfaction. The results revealed that job satisfaction was positively influenced by the extent of computer usage, aspects of computer-related training and demographic characteristics such as tenure and job position. Further, consideration of different areas of usage for different sub-groups (based on job-status & tenure) revealed that the extent of use in different functional areas (by different sub-groups) tended to affect user satisfaction to a different degree. In particular, it was found that computer usage in more varied activities such as R&D tended to have a strong positive impact on satisfaction while usage in other areas had varying impacts on the above sub-groups (i.e., managers and non-managers). The results illuminate some of the human resource and training issues and challenges that organizations engaged in extensive computerization may need to address.