ارزیابی و مدیریت کارکنان برای استقبال از تغییر : مقیاس چند آیتمی برای اندازه گیری آمادگی کارکنان برای کسب و کار الکترونیکی

It is imperative for businesses to use network and distributed information technology to integrate resources among organizations, vendors, employees, and suppliers to maximize value-added. Organizations are thus implementing electronic business (e-business) at an accelerating pace, fueling speculation about employee readiness to embrace this new type of firm. Unfortunately, scholarly research on this issue is lacking. Drawing on insights from extant literature and interviews with practitioners, this article first proposes the construct of employee readiness for e-business (EREB) and its conceptualization. Then it describes a program of research undertaken to develop an EREB instrument by defining, operationalizing, and refining the construct to create a multiple-item measurement scale, and assessing the scale's psychometric properties. By strictly iterative processes, a well-validated EREB instrument is constructed. The instrument and its comprehensive model proposed in this paper will be of use to researchers and practitioners interested in designing, implementing, and managing e-business.

For most firms, becoming an e-business is an evolutionary journey from initial to final stages (Earl, 2000; Hackbarth and Kettinger, 2000). This kind of transformation may involve adopting new technologies, redesigning business processes, and restructuring management (Craig and Jutla, 2001; Earl, 2000; Hackbarth and Kettinger, 2000; Laudon and Laudon, 2004). To reduce the turbulence caused by change and enable firms to transform themselves into e-businesses, change must be supported by a critical mass of stakeholders, including customers, partners, and especially, employees (Benjamin and Levinson, 1993; Craig and Jutla, 2001). Managers should carefully assess employee readiness to embrace e-business since the changes involved in e-business implementation will often trigger significant resistance to change and perhaps lead to the failure of the e-business. This can occur (1) when employees are comfortable with the status quo; (2) when they do not understand why change is desirable; and (3) when they doubt about the company's ability to achieve the desired change (Beckhard and Harris, 1987). Thus, employee levels of efficacy, motivation, and psychological maturity in facing change will affect the success of e-business implementation. This makes testing for employee readiness for change as important as analyzing technological feasibility when implementing e-business. Readiness is a developmental and motional concept. Psychologists and educators are convinced that children can learn only after attaining specified level of “readiness,” by which they mean the physical maturity and neurological development sufficient to negotiate an unfamiliar situation or learn a new task (Dennis, 1972; Gesell, 1928). Furthermore, Beller (1972) identified the leverage that human motivation, interpersonal relationships, and cognitive style have on readiness and argued that apprehension, a common reaction to new and strange situations, produces an inhibiting effect upon readiness. According to prior studies (Beller, 1972; Dennis, 1972; Gesell, 1928), readiness is not only physical maturity, but also a combination of emotional and cognitive forces that mediate learning environments and result in the mastery of new operation. Readiness for change appears to be a crucial maturity or energy indicator when implementing e-business. An e-business organization can be viewed as a social system wherein the employee, an important element of organization, is highly related to the beginning (human input) and ending (human output) in this system (Beer, 1980). Knowing how to help employees (members of organizations) achieve high levels of motives, needs, capabilities, and expectations will increase organizational effectiveness. Hence, in facing the different kinds of change (technology, task, and structure) triggered by implementation of e-business, understanding how to raise employee readiness for e-business will facilitate employee willingness to embrace change. The concept of readiness for change is an important managerial issue that has received attention from scholars in organizational management research (Cunningham et al., 2002; Jones et al., 2005), health care (Prochaska et al., 1992; Walker, 2004), marketing (Parasuraman, 2000), and information management (Abu-Musa, 2004; Bajaj and Leonard, 2004; Dubelaar et al., 2005; Glantz, 1999; Lin and Lin, 2008; Taylor and Wright, 2004). As mentioned earlier, employee readiness for e-business is one of the two major indicators of how ready employees are to embrace e-business, the other being an organizational energy for implementing e-business. However, research in this area is still in its infancy. Though a few studies have explored issues regarding readiness of e-business and attempted to provide new insights for management (Craig and Jutla, 2001; Lai et al., 2006; Sapp, 2000; Sullivan, 2000), they either lack solid theoretical frameworks or mostly focus on technology adoption from the organizational perspective (Lai et al., 2006; Sullivan, 2000) or country viewpoint (Moodley, 2003), rather than from the viewpoint of individual employee readiness for e-business (EREB). Transforming the concept of EREB into a concrete index or measure will help managers understand their employees and raise their readiness. With the foregoing in mind, this paper develops an instrument for measuring employee readiness for e-business. The EREB instrument and comprehensive model proposed in this study may be of value to researchers and practitioners interested in designing, implementing, and managing e-business. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The next section reviews prior research related to readiness, change theory, and organizational development. Subsequent sections describe the measurement and the steps involved in scale development. The final section discusses new findings, implications, and applications of the proposed scale.

The EREB instrument was rigorously tested and we have a high degree of confidence in the reliability and validity of its scales. This paper offers several contributions to the research and practitioner communities. Major contributions are: 1. we provide a framework describing the primary dimensions of EREB. It can also be applied to comparative analysis across several businesses and industries; 2. this study proposes a readiness stage model describing how and help employees who are ready for change; 3. we translate the framework into a validated instrument for measuring the level of EREB; 4. some norms, including common statistics, are developed for managers to monitor and increase employee readiness for e-business; 5. we analyze averaged EREB scores across constructs and relationships between demographics and EREB scores. These findings can not only be used as directions for increasing employee readiness for e-business, but also as a reference for future research; 6. finally, we propose managerial tools for different stages of employee readiness for e-business. These managerial tools not only provide direction for practitioners in managing e-businesses, but may also serve as a theoretical framework for future research into e-business management. Three limitations of this study should be noted. First, investigating EREB is relatively new. The findings and their implications are obtained from a single study of a particular technology in Taiwan. Thus, caution needs to be used when generalizing our findings. Second, though the scope of e-business is widely defined, this paper narrowed its research scope to the inner administration of e-business because our research resources were limited. Finally, the study was conducted with a snapshot research approach. Additional efforts such as confirmatory research are needed to evaluate the validity of the proposed model and our findings.