The relationship between user participation and user satisfa

Abstract

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 4 contingency factors - task complexity, system complexity, user influence, and user-developer communication - on the relationship between user participation and user satisfaction are investigated. It is hypothesized that these specific contingency factors should aid in identifying situations where user participation would have a strong relationship with satisfaction. An analysis of 151 independent systems development projects in 8 different organizations indicates that user participation has a direct relationship with user satisfaction. In addition, the 4 contingency factors are found to play key roles in this relationship.