The Predictive Factors of New Technology Adoption, Workers' Well-Being and Absenteeism: The Case of a Public Maritime Company in Venice

Examining online learning platform characteristics and employee engagement relationship during Covid-19

Purpose

As work-from-home policies were being implemented during Covid-19, organizations have been migrating their learning and development programs to digital platforms. This study aims to understand the role of employees’ perceptions about four key attributes of online learning platforms (OLPs), namely, online environment, ease of use, online content (OC) and online engagement anchors in their levels of work engagement (WE). Further, it also investigates how the personality attributes of the employees and financial incentives for online learning influence this relationship.

Design/methodology/approach

Using the snowball sampling technique, online questionnaires were distributed to about 350 employees in four IT firms in India who were working from home during the Covid-19 period. The total number of valid responses was 306 and consisted of software developers, technical leads, process specialists, testers and managers. The analysis was done using Python software (V.3.7.4) packages and Process Macro (pyprocessmacro V.1.0.8) developed for Python.

Findings

Perceived OLP features significantly influence employee WE. OC and ease of use are significant influencers of employee WE. The perception of OLP features indirectly affects WE through the learner’s personality characteristics. Moreover, the financial incentive to learn online shares a negative interaction effect with OLP features to influence WE.

Originality/value

The paper contributes to the existing literature on virtual knowledge management by identifying the driving factors that reinforce the acceptance of OLPs. Moreover, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to link online learning management system key characteristics with employee outcome as engagement. Most of the previous work has ignored exploring such a relationship in an organizational setting.

Perceived usefulness of technology and multiple salient outcomes: the improbable case of oil and gas workers

This research aimed at assessing the effect perceived usefulness of technology on multiple salient outcomes in Nigeria. Specifically determining how employee performance affects the perceived usefulness of technology in the oil and gas sector. The study used a descriptive research design. The target population of the study was 495 employees of selected oil and gas firms in Nigeria who have been recognized to have adopted strategies to communicate the usefulness of adopted technology in their business operations. This study used the purposive sampling technique to collect data from the employees of the selected firm. The questionnaire was used as the main data collection instrument, on a population of 495 and a total of 460 was collected back for the study analysis. A descriptive research design was adopted to establish trends related to the objectives of this study. Specifically, this research used a quantitative method (questionnaire) for the collection of data while structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data collected. The result showed that the perceived usefulness of technology has a significant effect on salient outcomes on workers in the oil and gas. Hence, the result shows that the perceived usefulness of technology contributes more to employees' satisfaction, organizational support, and employees' productivity while employees' commitment had the least. This study recommended that organizations in the oil and gas industry have to increase their efforts using strategies to improve the use of adopted technologies to promote employees’ commitment. However, organizations are to maintain strategies of perceived usefulness of technology on organizational support.