| All aspects of the contemporary work environment are influenced by the increasingly rapid advances in information technology. An example is telecommuting which challenges managers, especially human resource managers, to harness its potential to benefit organizations. Like other workplace features, telecommuting is likely to be related to affective job responses, such as satisfaction and motivation and other work-related attitudes, e.g., organizational commitment, organizational trust, and team effectiveness. This research empirically examines these relationships to better understand them and to provide direction for organizations, managers, and employees in telecommuting environments. This study found positive relationships between two work-related attitudes (organizational commitment and organizational trust), the Motivating Potential Score (job characteristics), and job satisfaction in telecommuting environments. There were, as expected, positive relationships between the MPS and the three work attitudes (organizational commitment, organizational trust and team effectiveness). Of the demographic variables, only education level was positively related to job satisfaction. Degree of telecommuting was not related to job satisfaction suggesting that those who telecommute and those who do not are equally satisfied. Understanding these relationships is very important to telecommuting organizations, their employees, and managers. The importance of human resource development in telecommuting is revealed by the results from this study. The results indicate that work-related attitudes and job enrichment are still important in today's work place to both telecommuters and non-telecommuters. These findings reflect more of a concern with employee expertise and productivity concerns. Also, the results of this study have forced employers to focus more on job enrichment and essential employee competencies for alternative work arrangements in telecommuting environment. |
