Information Technology Employees in State Government

Abstract

This article explores the affective organizational commitment, job involvement, and job satisfaction of an increasingly important segment of the public sector workforce: information technology (IT) employees in state government. We propose a model that explores job characteristics and work experiences variables that together influence affective organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and job involvement. Using canonical correlation analysis, we find that role ambiguity, perceived organizational support, leader—member exchange, and task variety are the independent variables that together explain most of the variance in the affective organizational commitment and job satisfaction of IT employees working for one-state government. In contrast to findings based on private sector IT employees, our analysis does not identify major gender differences. Taken together, these findings advance our understanding of affective commitment and job satisfaction within the public sector and provide agency managers actionable ideas on how to retain valuable IT employees.