Information technology services indutry and job design

Abstract

Service businesses produce over 70 percent of the gross domestic product in developed nations and there has been an increasing dependency on information technology to deliver services. Over the last few decades, many large companies that provide IT-based products have transformed their businesses into service oriented businesses. For those organizational changes, the job design must also be considered because the distinctive characteristics of service businesses require different skills than what was found in manufacturing. In reality, however, while the proportion of service businesses is increasing in such work organizations, service businesses produce job stress that can lead to health problems. Although stress perception appears to be the major factor of discomfort in IT services industry, studies about effective ways to design a job or avoid job stress are not so many. In this paper, several factors that produce job stress are discussed based on a conceptual model. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.