Can Political Skill Enhance Business and IT Knowledge?

ABSTRACT

We examine whether Chief Information Officers’ (CIOs’) political skill enhances their IT and business knowledge as a means of influencing executive teams’ commitment to strategic and operational IT initiatives. We empirically examine these relationships using data collected from 139 CIOs. The results suggest CIOs’ business and IT knowledge is significantly related to influencing executive team commitment to strategic and operational IT initiatives, but political skill only enhances business knowledge for influencing executive team commitment to operational IT initiatives.

KEYWORDS:

• Chief Information Officer (CIO)
• influence
• IT decision making
• knowledge
• political skill

Notes

^1. The use of “strategic” versus “operational” is common in the strategic alignment literature (Gerow, Grover, Thatcher, & Roth, 2014).

^2. The complete item development process is described in the third essay of the lead author’s dissertation (Gerow 2011).

^3. We used a q-sort to demonstrate content validity. The overall item placement ratio within the target constructs was 92.2%, which suggested a high potential for construct and discriminant validity as well as very good reliability coefficients.

^4. We conducted interviews with two academics well-versed in survey creation and administration, and with six practitioners familiar with CIO issues (i.e., pre-testing of the instrument). We then ran a pilot study by surveying 35 senior-level IT professionals (e.g., CIOs, VPs of IT) to test the overall instrument.

^5. We used a t-test in SPSS to calculate the significant R² change.

^6. Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for making this suggestion.

^7. Any numbers that do not add up to 139 are due to respondents not answering the question.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer E. Gerow

Jennifer E. Gerow is an assistant professor in the Economics and Business Department at Virginia Military Institute. She holds a BS degree in biological sciences with a minor in secondary education, an MBA, and a PhD in management (concentration: information systems) from Clemson University. Her research interests are IT–business strategic alignment, power and politics in the workplace, and drivers of IT use/resistance. She has publications in MIS Quarterly, European Journal of Information Systems, Information and Management, Computers in Human Behavior, Journal of Information Technology Theory and Application, Journal of Service Science and Management, and the proceedings of various conferences.

Varun Grover

Varun Grover is the William S. Lee (Duke Energy) Distinguished professor of Information Systems at Clemson University. He has published over 220 articles in major IS refereed journals, and has an h-index of 77 and over 27,000 citations in Google Scholar. Thompson Reuters recognized him as a Highly Cited Research in 2013. He is Senior Editor for MISQ Executive, Section Editor of JAIS, and Senior Editor (Emeritus) for MIS Quarterly, the Journal of the AIS, and Database. His current work focuses on the impacts of digitalization on individuals and organizations. He is a Fellow of the Association of Information Systems.

Jason Bennett Thatcher

Jason Bennett Thatcher is a professor of Information Systems in the Department of Management at Clemson University. Dr. Thatcher’s research examines the influence of individual beliefs and characteristics on adaptive and maladaptive post-adoption information technology use. He also studies strategic and human resource management issues related to the effective application of information technologies in organizations. His work appears in MIS Quarterly, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Management Information Systems, European Journal of Information Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. He has served as President of the Association for Information Systems.