An experimental study of the human/computer interface
Communications of the ACM
SIGCPR '80 Proceedings of the seventeenth annual computer personnel research conference
Building synergistic EDP teams
SIGCPR '77 Proceedings of the fifteenth annual SIGCPR conference
SIGCPR '77 Proceedings of the fifteenth annual SIGCPR conference
Do organizational citizenship behaviors lead to information system success?
Information and Management
Leader personal influences on membership decisions in moderated online social networking groups
Decision Support Systems
The Changing Roles of the Systems Analyst
Information Resources Management Journal
Business-Information Systems Professional Differences: Bridging the Business Rule Gap
Information Resources Management Journal
Information Resources Management Journal
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Information systems for large firms are typically designed by a team comprised of both users and systems personnel. The Management Information System (MIS) literature discusses a communication gap between the organization oriented users and the more technical systems staff. It is often hypothesized that systems personnel and users are different in terms of personality and behavior characteristics and that these differences are one of the primary reasons for the existence of a communication gap. This article summarizes a two-phased study. The first phase investigated personality characteristics of respondents from thirty-two large organizations who worked on design teams. The second phase examines, in detail, a system success and failure in one organization. Analysis was performed to see if there are significant differences on personality dimensions between users and systems personnel and to explore the relationship between these differences and system success. An operationalization of Jung's personality typology (Myers-Briggs Type indicator) was employed. The results show that the users involved in the systems design are very similar to their systems counterparts. Even more surprising is that the characteristics of these users are closer to the popular descriptions of systems staff than the analysts are. They also suggest that these similarities in personality types may have an impact on system success. The general implications of these findings in terms of the management of project teams and the MIS designs they create are discussed.