The impact of relationship between IT staff and users on employee outcomes of IT users

Purpose: Firms invest much money in information technology (IT) since IT support has been recognized as a critical enabler of employee outcomes. However, the value obtained by organizations and their employees is not always as much as they anticipated because of, at least partly, a poor relationship between IT staff and users. The purpose of this paper is to apply the social capital theory to examine relationship management between IT and business and explores mechanisms through which social capital between IT staff and users affect users’ employee outcomes, including job satisfaction and job performance. Design/methodology/approach: Based on social capital theory and past literature, the researchers propose a research model and explore the effect of social capital on knowledge sharing, IT users’ perceived service quality, job satisfaction and ultimately job performance. Based on a survey of 289 respondents, this study applies the partial least square technique to test the research model. Findings: Mediation test was performed to explore the effect mechanisms of social capital on employee outcomes, and the results indicate that three dimensions of social capital affect IT users’ job satisfaction and job performance in different approaches. Originality/value: This study uses social capital theory to direct how to improve the poor relationship between IT staff and users and provides a useful insight into the mechanisms through which three dimensions of social capital improve users’ job satisfaction and job performance.