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The monograph analyses (a) the potential impact of information technology (IT) on organisational issues that directly concern the personnel function; (b) the nature of personnel’s involvement in the decision making and activities surrounding the choice and implementation of advanced technologies, and (c) their own use of IT in developing and carrying out their own range of specialist activities. The monograph attempts to explain why personnel’s involvement is often late, peripheral and reactive. Finally, an analysis is made of whether personnel specialists – or the Human Resource Management function more generally – will play a more proactive role in relation to such technologies in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of strategy messages emanating from both top and middle/supervisory managers regarding five different aspects of strategy on strategic awareness among boundary personnel.

The results come from a survey of bank tellers and customer service representatives within a single large regional bank.

The findings support a differential main effect on strategic awareness among boundary personnel depending on the source of messages, whether top management or middle management. More interestingly, there appears to be an interaction effect between the two sources regarding which will be the dominant information source for boundary personnel.

The survey data were collected within a single banking institution at one time point.

The results provide useful information concerning the efficacy of messages concerning strategy from middle and top management in organizations.

The paper extends past research by investigating different levels of strategic understanding within the firm across different levels and determining information dissemination strategies for increasing the level of strategic awareness among boundary personnel.

Uses the job characteristics theory and additional research to measure the impact of growth needs, group interaction, advanced technology, change acceptance and the motivating potential of jobs in the IS profession. Specifically, IS maintenance professionals were compared with IS development professionals in a large midwestern organization in a study in which 208 IS professionals from four maintenance and development groups participated. Find a significant difference between IS developers and IS maintenance personnel in growth needs, advance technology strength and change acceptance. The motivating potential of jobs and group interaction strength were found not to be significant. The findings suggest that IS developers accept changes more readily than IS maintenance personnel. Thus, subgroups in the IS profession react differently to change. Advance technology will benefit IS developers more than IS maintenance personnel, suggesting that advanced technology should be given to the system developers first. IS developers respond more positively to positions which provide an opportunity to stretch their abilities, providing higher personal growth. This research could be used by practitioners and academics to manage the workforce of the future and to add to the database on motivation.

Practitioners who work with information technology (IT) are reported to be experiencing rising levels of work‐related stress. The origins of the stress coming from increasing demands from system users, advances in technology, and the growing use of information and communication technologies to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of intra‐ and inter‐organizational business activities. In the field of information systems, stress‐related research has been limited and the way in which IT personnel cope with stress has not been explored. Thus, the research presented in this paper investigates whether coping and affect (both negative and positive) influence adjustment (anxiety, depression and stress) among IT personnel.

A sample of 100 IT personnel from Australia completed a questionnaire, which contained measures for adjustment, affect state, and coping strategies. The use of hierarchical regression analyses demonstrated that specific individual characteristics influenced the psychological adjustment of the IT personnel sampled.

IT personnel who engaged in a more problem‐focused style of coping, such as active coping were found to be better adjusted than those who engaged in a more emotion‐focused styles of coping, such as cognitive‐avoidance coping, social coping, accepting responsibility, and self‐controlling coping. Serendipitously, the research revealed that increased depression of IT personnel was associated with positive affect.

The research shows that the psychological adjustment of IT personnel is influenced by the types of coping strategies they use, specific individual demographics and their affect state.

This paper seeks to identify information enabling and supporting production ramp‐up processes, by exploring critical events and the role of information in such events.

The research approach was based on empirical and theoretical investigations. A selection of 30 events, considered the most critical for production ramp‐up realization and/or performance at one Swedish automotive company, were categorized and constituted the base for the analysis which focused information types and sources enabling event handling.

Information enabling event handling is a balanced combination of problem and domain information, regardless of event category. However, a differentiation concerning preference and usage of information types between experienced and less experienced personnel is identified. Problem‐solving information has the character of pragmatic information, composed of complementary parts of confirmation and novelty in terms of domain and problem information. The preferred information source in all event categories was “other people”.

The study focuses on the application of information in relation to critical events during production ramp‐up. General information theory is not addressed in depth.

Information type and information source are not dependent on certain event categories, which allows a general information strategy enabling production ramp‐up. To facilitate production ramp‐up and event handling managers and key personnel need to apply a holistic perspective and need to be updated on domain information of the products, the equipment, and the production process during production ramp‐up.

The originality is in the focus and role of information to achieve an efficient production ramp‐up performance. A supporting model is developed which describes the structure of pragmatic information for personnel with various levels of experience, regardless of event category.

Presents the results of a survey of the use of human resource information systems (HRIS) in smaller organizations, conducted in 1998. The survey enquires as to the nature of information stored electronically in three core areas: personnel, training and recruitment as well as the type of information analysis being undertaken. Significant relationships were found between the total number of people employed by the organization, and certain aspects of its information storage and manipulation. Smaller organizations were also found to be less likely to use HRIS, and HRIS was also used less frequently in training and recruitment. No sectoral differences were found. Similar to the results of IES/IPD surveys, and some academic work, it was found that HRIS are still being used to administrative ends rather than analytical ones.

On the basis of a review of the literature in human resource information systems (HRIS) and a diagnosis of some computerized placement systems used by large US corporations, identifies major problems in using computerized HRIS for internal staffing. Proposes a self‐balancing staffing system, built around a rational screening procedure. This system, although it may be altered to fit various circumstances, can serve at least three purposes: (1) to fill an opening resulting from termination of the incumbent; (2) to update the candidate search criteria on the basis of changes in job definitions; and (3) to pursue system‐wide optimization by periodically checking the fit between jobs and persons. Finally, explores some practical issues about how to integrate such an automated staffing system with manual ones and discusses the implications for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to explore routes of dissatisfaction feedback transferrals within a Swedish machine industry segment. The study focuses upon transferrals from dissatisfied users to the product development organizations. There is also an interest in determining whether the feedback is reliable and, if not, how to improve the reliability of this information to create a better basis for decision‐making.

The paper presents the results from a qualitative interview‐based study of 16 product development organizations and their customer dissatisfaction feedback systems. About 84 percent of the companies within a machine industry segment in Sweden are covered. Based on the empirical investigation, a typology describes four different dissatisfaction feedback constructs, depending on whether the feedback system is active or passive, and on whether the feedback is codified or personalized.

The study indicates that parallel usage of codified and personalized dissatisfaction feedback, compared to using these transferrals in isolation only, improves reliability of dissatisfaction information and puts product developers in a better position when deciding on future actions. However, a real challenge is how to turn passive dissatisfaction routes into active ones. Managing passive dissatisfaction routes with service personnel and call centres as knowledge carriers more actively in product development can certainly reveal many of the hidden needs of users.

Our project is essentially managerial, aiming to provide managers and other decision‐makers with a framework to establish reliable and adequate customer feedback systems for more effective product development.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the influence that internal marketing, represented by internal market orientation (IMO), might have on the internal aspects (satisfaction of contact personnel) and external aspects (customer satisfaction and perceived quality of service) of organisational performance.

Interviews were carried out with all the cashiers of the 16 branches of a small, local credit institution, and with 160 customers who normally operate with this bank.

The results show that employee orientation or internal market orientation, through the dimension informal generation of information, influences the satisfaction of contact personnel, the quality of service perceived by the customer and, through the latter, the customer's satisfaction. It also corroborates the influence exerted by the contact personnel's satisfaction on the perception of quality and on the satisfaction of the customer receiving the service.

The main limitation of the study is that it analyses a single financial entity, with the characteristics and behaviours that the latter has in its relationship with its employees.

One of the key elements for achieving quality in the service offered by the contact personnel is to achieve their satisfaction. For this, it is necessary for firms to adopt an employee or internal marketing orientation so that the contact personnel come to perceive fair treatment and special attention by managers towards them and their work.

The paper verifies the validity and reliability of the internal market orientation construct (IMO) as a scale of measurement of the internal marketing concept in a different business sector and with a different methodology from those dealt with in the literature. It also demonstrates empirically the influence of IMO on variables internal to the organisation (satisfaction of contact personnel) and external to it (customer's satisfaction and the quality he/she perceives).

Incident sites can be described as the joint work site of the emergency services, where one of their challenges is to interact with the public. The purpose of this paper is to study how this interaction is structured by the emergency personnel's jurisdictional claims.

This paper rests upon qualitative method and in-depth interviews. In total, 28 people have been interviewed, out of which 13 are emergency personnel and 15 are unaffiliated volunteers. The interview material has been analysed qualitatively and thematically by the authors.

The findings show that the interaction between emergency personnel and unaffiliated volunteers can be described in terms of three different boundary practices: cordoning off, division of labour and conversation, varying in degrees of inclusion and exclusion. The result shows that the emergency personnel's relationship to volunteers is ambivalent, as they are both seen as an uncertain element at the incident site in need of control and as a valuable source of information.

While most other studies have been focusing on the interaction between emergency organizations, the authors have investigated the interaction between emergency organizations and a group previously unstudied: unaffiliated volunteers. While sociologists in the field of boundary work normally describe boundary practices in terms of negotiation, sympathizing with the concept of negotiated order, the results point to the fact that boundaries are not necessarily a subject for negotiation.