PARTICIPATION AND INFORMATION QUALITY
Journal of Information Technology Management Volume XX, Number 4, 2009 14
entering the situation positively influences the effect of
user participation on information quality. A possible
explanation to this result is that a user, who is competent
in sizing up the communication situation, including the
people involved in such a situation, tends to know how to
communicate his/her needs appropriately. In other words,
he/she knows how to effectively deliver their needs in
such a way that others can completely understand.
Finally, communication apprehension did not
have a significant moderating effect on the relationship
between user participation and information quality.
Although in theory, a person who is communicatively
apprehensive is more likely to be unwilling to
communicate than a person who is less communicatively
apprehensive, there might be other factors that can
overcome one’s communication apprehension, which
were not captured in this study. For example, a system
developer with a high level of communication skills may
be able to lessen the apprehensiveness in users.
There are some limitations with this study. First,
the sample size is small. A problem we encountered was
many of the system developers who participated in this
study typically worked with user representatives rather
than a large community of users. Therefore, only a few
users were selected and involved in system development
projects. Second, although every system developer who
participated in this study was told to list all names of
users that had been involved in system development
projects, we could not be certain whether the system
developers did so. Some system developers might list
only those users whom they knew well or they felt would
give positive responses about the system development
project. Consequently, this potential bias could potentially
cause a problem of under-representing the end users who
