The Relationship Between User Participation and User Satisfaction: An Investigation of Four Contingency Factors
Authors: McKeen, James; Guimaraes, Tor; Wetherbe, and James
Journal: MIS Quarterly (1984)
DOI: 10.2307/249523
User participation has been widely touted by the MIS community as a means to improve user satisfaction within systems development. This claim, however, has not been consistently substantiated in the empirical literature. In seeking to explain such equivocal results, the effects of four contingency factors—task complexity, system complexity, user influence, and userdeveloper communication—on the relationship between user participation and user satisfaction were investigated. As suggested in the literature, this research tests hypotheses that these specific contingency factors should aid in identifying situations where user participation would have a strong relationship with satisfaction. Analysis of 151 independent systems development projects in eight different organizations indicated that user participation has a direct relationship with user satisfaction. In addition, the four contingency factors were found to play key roles on this relationship. Task complexity and system complexity proved to be pure moderators. That is, the strength of the participation-satisfaction relationship depended on the level of these factors. In projects where there was a high level of task complexity…