The role of contemporary skills in information technology professionals: An FsQCA approach

Abstract

Information Technology (IT) industries’ knowledge and ability to innovate, heavily relies in the skills of the IT professionals. In particular, inefficiencies usually come from the lack of skills or IT professionals’ inability to apply them in a way that allows a firm to adapt and evolve concurrently with business demands. In order to examine the interplay of skills related with data analysis, entrepreneurship, business, communication and collaboration, and their combined effect in enhancing employees’ perceived work performance, a conceptual model is developed and examined on a data sample of 72 IT professionals, through fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). The findings indicate five configurations that lead to high perceived work performance. The outcomes of the analysis show the importance of collaboration and entrepreneurship, since they appear in most of the configurations/solutions; but also the importance of data analysis, which can lead to high work performance even with the absence of all the other skills. This study also confirms that the identified skills portray to a good extend IT professionals’ work performance, which is critical for a firm to evolve and innovate.