Towards a Contingency Approach of information Center Management

Abstract

As defined in our previous paper (Kim and Sikula, 2003), there could be three types o f person and roles they play in the workplace: Necessity, Common and Parasite. A Necessity is the one who is an irreplaceable person. A Common is a worker o f average ability and talent, and a Parasite is an employee free-loader who is a moocher more than a contributor. The purpose o f this paper is to replicate the first paper, and compare the results o f two data sets. The data for the first paper collected from 34 undergraduate senior students in an Organizational Behavior (OB) class, and the second set o f data was collected from 38 working MBA students in an OB class and managers in a company. The identified five important traits and behaviors for Necessity and Parasite from both datasets were very similar. However, the five important traits and behaviors for Common were quite different between the first survey and the second) The potential explanations for the similarities and the differences are suggested, and future research directions are suggested.