Telecommuting in a Developing Economy Context: Critical Success Factors and Impact on Organizational Performance

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to ascertain the discontinuities of the virtual environment in Ghanaian firms, determine the success factors of implementing telecommuting and examine the effect of telecommuting on the performance of organizations. The objectives were thus to ascertain the discontinuities of the virtual environment in Ghanaian firms, to determine the CSFs driving the success of telecommuting in these firms and to examine the relationships between the CSFs and individual, team and managerial performance of the organization. In order to carry out the study, the researcher employed a quantitative research approach using questionnaires in collecting data from 310 respondents. The respondents were knowledge workers from organizations such as Higher Education Institutions, Accounting and Audit firms, Banking and Insurance firms as well as Telecom and IT firms. A PLS-SEM analysis was performed on the collected data to examine the impact of telecommuting on organizational performance. The study relied on the principles of the socio-technical systems theory as the dominant theory among others to test how multiple social and technical factors co-jointly influence organizational performance at multi-levels. This theory was adapted because telecommuting in this study was viewed as socio technical organizational system. Four discontinuities namely geography, culture, work practice and organization, and technology discontinuities were identified from literature and were employed by the researcher to characterize the virtual environment. The findings show that there were no discontinuities in the virtual environment for the studied organizations. Thereafter, the study focused on telecommuting in the context of a developing economy by identifying critical success factors and examined their impact on organizational performance. Telecommuting is a phenomenon that can have a multidimensional impact on an organization hence, organizational performance in this study was measured at the individual employee level, team level and managerial level. Five (5) telecommuting critical success factors (CSF) as identified in literature, were employed in the study. Intra-organizational communication, employee characteristics, learning and knowledge sharing constituted the social factors whereas support and technology and media richness constituted the technical factors. Among the five CSFs explored, intra-organizational communication, learning and knowledge sharing (LKS), employee characteristics (social factors) and technology and media richness (technical factor) emerged from the findings as the CSFs for telecommuting as these factors were found to impact organizational performance at the individual, team or managerial levels. Technology and media richness had a significant positive effect on performance at all the three levels of organization examined whereas intra organizational communication was found to be closely linked with managerial communication. LKS was shown to be significant in positively affecting performance only at the employee level of the organization while employee characteristics was significant in determining the performance of teams. Ultimately, these show that, telecommuting does have multilevel impact on the performance of organizations and this multilevel impact must be considered in order for organizations to harness benefits from their telecommuting implementations.