Impacts of Information and Communication Technology Implementations on Employees’ Jobs in Service Organizations in India : A Multi-method Longitudinal Field Study

India is an important frontier for economic growth, investments and development. The service sector, like the manufacturing industry, in India is booming. Following the trend of their western counterparts, service organizations in India are implementing enterprise-level information and communication technologies (ICTs) to support service processes. In this paper, we used socio-technical systems theory to develop hypotheses about the effects of ICTs on the five job characteristics, i.e., skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback, in the job characteristics model (JCM) in a service organization (a bank) in India. We also tested the entire JCM that relates job characteristics to job satisfaction and job performance via various mediators and moderators. In a 32-month longitudinal field study of 1,743 employees, we gathered one wave of data before an ICT implementation and two waves after the implementation. We found that although the ICT enriched employees’ job characteristics, employees reported significantly lower job satisfaction and job performance. To understand this puzzling finding, we conducted a qualitative study and identified four contextual forces that contribute to these results and hinder successful implementation of ICTs in the service sector in India and possibly, other developing countries: environmental barriers, learning difficulty, culture shock, and employee valuation