Communication competence factors as moderators to the relationship between user participation and information quality

PARTICIPATION AND INFORMATION QUALITY
Journal of Information Technology Management Volume XX, Number 4, 2009
6
User’s experience in his/her current job may be
beneficial to system development, as system developer
can acquire job-related knowledge from these users and
know what kind of information these users need. This
kind of acquired knowledge, in turn, results in a system
that provides high-quality information. The second
hypothesis is stated as follows:
H2a: The more experience a participating user has with
the current system (or of systems of a similar nature), the
stronger the relationship between user participation and
information quality of a system.
H2b: The more experience a participating user has with
the current job, the stronger the relationship between user
participation and information quality of a system.
While the second hypothesis is about what a user
knows, the third hypothesis is about how competently a
user delivers their messages. According to the
communication competence concept, “competence” bears
two meanings: appropriateness and effectiveness. In the
user-participation context, a user with communicative
competence or skills must not only be able to say what
they intend to say but also realize when to say what to
whom. Interacting with users with higher communicative
competence during user participation, a system developer
should have clearer understandings of the system
requirements than he would with those with lower
communicative competence. Hence, users’ degrees of
communicative competence are proposed to moderate the
relationship between user participation and information
quality of the system’s outputs. In other words, the more
competently a user communicates with system developers
during participation, the stronger the relationship between
user participation and information quality of a system.
There are 5 components of the communication
competence: planning, modeling, presence, reflection, and
consequence cognitions. The following is the definitions
of these five cognitions as defined by Duran and
Spitzberg [9]:
•