Exploring Differences in Employee Turnover Intentions and Its Determinants among Telecommuters and Non-Telecommuters

Abstract:As telecommuting programs proliferate, a better understanding of the relationship between telecommuting and career success outcomes is required to provide human resources managers, telecommuters, and information systems managers with information to decide the future of telecommuting arrangements. This paper addresses this need by exploring whether turnover intentions and their determinants differ for telecommuters and non-telecommuters. Four hundred salespeople from one large company in the southeastern United States were asked to participate in the study. The organization entry point was the marketing director. One hundred and four telecommuting employees and one hundred and twenty-one regular employees responded, with a total of 225 usable questionnaires. Telecommuters seemed to face less role conflict and role ambiguity and tended to be happier with their supervisors and more committed to their organizations. They also showed lower satisfaction with peers and with promotion. Based on the results, recommendations are proposed for managing the implementation of telecommuting programs and their impact on the rest of the organization's employee population.Key Words and Phrases: job satisfactionorganization commitmentrole ambiguityrole conflicttelecommutingturnover intentions Additional informationNotes on contributorsMagid IgbariaMagid Igbaria is a Professor of Information Science at the Claremont Graduate University and at the Faculty of Management, Graduate School of Business, Tel Aviv University. Formerly, he was a Visiting Professor of Decision Sciences at the University of Hawaii in Manoa and a Professor of MIS in the College of Business and Administration at Drexel University. He has published articles on virtual workplace, information economics, computer technology acceptance, IS personnel, management of IS, compumetrical approaches in IS, and international IS in Communications of the ACM, Computers and Operations Research, Decision Sciences, Decision Support Systems, Information and Management, Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, Omega, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, and others. His current research interests focus on electronic commerce, virtual workplace, telework, computer technology acceptance, information and computer economics management of IS, IS personnel, and international IS. He serves on the editorial board of Information Resources Management Journal, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, Journal of End-User Computing, Information Technology and People, and Computer Personnel. He is also an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems, Journal of Information Technology Cases and Applications, and MIS Quarterly and serves in the executive committee of Information Systems—HICSS–30 (1997), HICSS–31 (1998), and HICSS–32 (1999). He is coauthor of The Virtual Workplace (Idea Group Publishing, 1998).Tor GuimaraesTor Guimaraes holds the Jesse E. Owen Chair of Excellence at Tennessee Technological University. He has a Ph.D. in MIS from the University of Minnesota and an M.B. A. from California State University, Los Angeles. Dr. Guimaraes was a professor and department chair at St. Cloud State University. Before that, he was an assistant professor and director of the MIS Certificate Program at Case Western Reserve University. He has been the keynote speaker at numerous national and international meetings sponsored by organizations such as the Information Processing Society of Japan, Institute of Industrial Engineers, American Society for Quality Control, IEEE, ASM, and Sales and Marketing Executives. He has consulted with many leading organizations, including TRW, American Greetings, ATandT, IBM, and the Department of Defense, and has published over one hundred articles about the effective use and management of information systems and other technologies.