THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN USER PARTICIPATION AND USER SATISFACTION - AN INVESTIGATION OF 4 CONTINGENCY FACTORS

User participation has been widely touted by the MIS community as a me ans to improve user satisfaction within systems development. This clai m, however, has not been consistently substantiated in the empirical l iterature. In seeking to explain such equivocal results, the effects o f four contingency factors-task complexity, system complexity, user in fluence, and user-developer communication-on the relationship between user participation and user satisfaction were investigated. As suggest ed in the literature, this research tests hypotheses that these specif ic contingency factors should aid in identifying situations where user participation would have a strong relationship with satisfaction. Ana lysis of 151 independent systems development projects in eight differe nt organizations indicated that user participation has a direct relati onship with user satisfaction. In addition, the four contingency facto rs were found to play key roles on this relationship. Task complexity and system complexity proved to be pure moderators. That is, the stren gth of the participation-satisfaction relationship depended on the lev el of these factors. In projects where there was a high level of task complexity or system complexity, the relationship between user partici pation and user satisfaction was significantly stronger than in projec ts where task complexity or system complexity was low. User influence and user-developer communication were shown to be independent predicto rs of user satisfaction. That is, user influence, or user-developer co mmunication, was positively related to user satisfaction regardless of the level of participation. The results help explain the relationship between user participation and user satisfaction by suggesting the na ture of the relationship under different sets of conditions. The impli cations are relevant to systems developers and to academicians seeking to explain how, when, why, and where user participation is needed.