The effects of time and personality on the productivity of management information systems

The paper studies the relationship between information technology (IT), time personality and managerial productivity. Time personality is captured by concepts of polychronicity and monochronicity. They reflect an individual's preference for being engaged in either many (polychronicity) or one (monochronicity) activity at a time block. The concepts of time personality, poly/monochronicity are represented by a set of the temporal dimensions. In this paper, we present a descriptive study in a form of survey, in which the temporal dimensions serve as mediators between IT and productivity. By conducting this study we aim to find evidence for the existence of a link between IT, poly/monochronicity and the productivity of managerial work. Analysis of the data shows the positive nature of the relationships between IT and productivity within the frames of the research design. Managers reported that IT influences productivity positively by altering the temporal dimensions. We also found differences between the impact of IT on the productivity of senior and middle managers. While the work of middle managers is greatly influenced by organizational processes, the work of senior managers is influenced by such a factor as their personality. Personal preferences are often ignored in current practice of IS development - a fact that weakens the positive impact of IT on the productivity of managers. In our paper, we propose an approach to the development of IS that takes into account a manager's time personality. The approach is based on an understanding and modeling of managerial activities and an elicitation of requirements imposed by different time personalities on the management information systems.

1. Introduction

The rapid introduction of IT in the business environment has raised the question of its impact on managerial productivity. The understanding of the concept of productivity differs depending on the knowledge domain: it varies from quantitative measures expressed in monetary units aggregated on a national and organizational level ([2], [22] and [5]) to subjective judgments expressed on an individual and group level [33]. We base our analysis on the subjective judgments of managerial productivity since considering productivity only from an investment perspective brings a good understanding of economic trends, but relatively few insights into how IT affects the nature of managerial work.