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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Motivation and Job Satisfaction among Information Systems Developers — Perspectives from Finland, Nigeria and Estonia: A Preliminary Study

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Information Systems (IS) have become one of the most important assets in organisations over the past decades. Adopting and using IS bestows a variety of advantages to organisations that are adept at it (Senker and Senker, 1992). Developing IS within organisations, unarguably serves the objectives of management. To that end, information systems development (ISD) professionals are pivotal in the implementations of such systems and their motivation and job satisfaction equally paramount. Some researchers have also commented on economic value of IS professionals to organisations (Niederman and Crosetto, 1996) Apparently, there is a growing body of literature on the issue of motivation and job satisfaction both in other fields (Locke, 1983; Herzberg et al., 1959; Scarpello and Campbell, 1983) and in the Information Systems domain (Mumford, 1972, Hackman and Oldham, 1978; Bartol andMartin, 1982; Couger, 1988, 1989; Eldon and Abraham, 1991;Goldstein and Rockart, 1984; Baroudi and Ginzberg, 1985; McMurtrey et al., 2002). Overall, this attention can be attributed to the increased interest in the human resources (HR) management of IS professionals (Niederman, et al., 1991, Champy, 1992) and the sociotechnical systems approaches to job design (Bostrom and Heinen, 1977; Pasmore, 1988). Past research on the motivation of IS personnel (Couger and Zawacki, 1980) and job satisfaction (Baroudi and Ginzberg, 1985; Goldstein and Rockart; Griesser, 1993) have been carried out using IS personnel within a single country; namely, the US, with the exception of a handful of cases that straddle national boundaries. Such few cases include the work of the following researchers (Couger, 1986; Couger et al., 1990; Bryan et al., 1995; Couger and Ishikawa, 1995). Consequently, this present study aims to fill this research gaps with its contribution to the discourse by using three new countries that have hitherto not