ICT use and job satisfaction. The moderating role of task characteristics

This paper focuses on the relationship between ICT use and job satisfaction, following a classic but always relevant research stream, and analyses the role of work design in moderating this relationship. The findings of the analysis, carried out on a sample of 35,187 employees in Europe (data source: EWCS2010), demonstrate that the use of ICT is important in bolstering the individual’s satisfaction about his/her own work. We also demonstrated that job design plays an important role in determining the strength and the form of the relationship between ICT use and job satisfaction. Our results offer interesting stimuli for a debate among scholars and practitioners on the management of employees in a context in which technologies represent an indispensable tool for workers, so that the role of the organization is to “design” tasks properly so as to grant them this new way of working.