Reskilling information systems professionals: examining individual differences in capacity for change

Although information systems (IS) researchers and managers have long sought to understand the factors that influence the outcomes of technology implementation, prior research has largely overlooked the role of individual employee differences in explaining their responses to technological innovations that are adopted at the firm level. Since IS managers currently seek to implement various innovations to improve the effectiveness of software development, this study seeks to understand how employee differences may explain their reactions to such software process innovations (Fichman and Kemerer 1993). Rather than examining factors that explain the voluntary individual adoption or use of technology (Igbaria et al. 1995; Zmud 1979), this research examines individual differences when innovations are adopted at the firm level (Agarwal et al. 1997; Fichman 1992), for example, where employees are subject to strong social or managerial influence (Leonard-Barton and Deschamps 1988) to adopt an innovation. The innovation examined is the organizational a doption of client/server development—an organization change process that is often associated with the reskilling or retooling of IS professionals (Ziff 1993).