Guzman et al. Occupational culture and commitment: Multicultural perspective Proceedings of the Twelfth Americas Conference on Information Systems, Acapulco, Mexico August 04 th -06 th 2006 Occupational Culture and Commitment in the IT Profession: A Multi-Country Perspective Indira R. Guzman Touro University International iguzman@tourou.edu Raed M. Sharif Syracuse University rmalshar@syr.edu Agnieszka Kwiatkowska Syracuse University akwiatko@syr.edu Qing Li Syracuse University qli03@syr.edu ABSTRACT Studies about Information Technology (IT) professionals have shown that occupational commitment can be influenced by several factors. However, there is little empirical evidence about the relationship between the adaptation of the cultural features of the IT occupation and the level of commitment to this occupation. In a previous research study conducted by Guzman, Stanton and associates (2006), a survey instrument was developed and initially tested on the sample of American college students in IT-related majors. In this study, the same instrument was adapted and tested on a sample of IT professionals in an international setting - Bolivia, Palestine, China, Colombia and Poland. The reliability of survey instrument turned out to be very consistent with the previous results and the adaptation to the features of the IT occupational culture (i.e. stereotyping, jargon language, unusual demands, need for continuous updating, and pervasiveness) were demonstrated to be good predictors of the commitment to the occupation. Furthermore, we also found interesting differences across countries, especially in terms of the nature and level of commitment. Keywords IT professionals, Occupational Subculture of IT professionals, Occupational Commitment, IT Workforce. INTRODUCTION For a long time, literature about commitment was to a large extent dominated by organizational commitment studies (Allen & Meyer, 1993; O'Reilly & Chatman, 1986; Reichers, 1985), and as a result, a great deal of our understanding of this phenomenon was based on these studies. The past two decades, however, have witnessed an increased production of literature about occupational commitment, which refers to the strength of motivation to work and to the attachment an individual has to an occupation (e.g. Blau, 1985; Morrow & Wirth, 1989; Wetzel, Soloshy & Gallagher, 1990; Meyer, Allen, and Smith, 1993; Lee et al., 2000; Blau, 2003; and Mencil, 2005). Meyer, Allen, and Smith (1993) presented empirical evidence for a three dimension view of occupational commitment drawn from a parallel structure they used for organizational commitment (Meyer & Allen, 1991). These three dimensions for occupational commitment are: affective, continuance, and normative. Affective commitment is a person’ s emotional attachment to their occupation. Employees with strong affective commitment remain with the occupation because they feel an emotional attachment to it. Continuance commitment involves the individual’ s assessment of the cost associated with leaving one’ s occupation. Finally, normative commitment is a person’ s sense of obligation to remain in their occupation. Studying the commitment to IT occupation is especially important because of the high turn over rates of IT employment and the difficulties to recruit and retain IT professionals (Guimaraes & Igbaria, 1992; Moore, 2000). Recent studies of the information technology (IT) workforce have focused on two important aspects of the occupation: the occupational subculture as defined by Trice (1993) and applied to the IT occupation (Guzman et al., 2004; Guzman & Stanton, 2005) and occupational commitment in the IT field as studied by Stanton and Guzman (Stanton et. al., 2006; Guzman, 2006). The study of occupational subculture of IT workers showed that these workers indeed occupy a distinct and recognizable “occupational subculture” that crosses and transcends the particular organizational culture in which those IT professionals are embedded. The occupational culture of IT workers is characterized, for example, by the great value to the technical knowledge, use of technical jargon, need for constant self re-education, feelings of superiority, and a general lack of formal rules. 161