AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION INTO THE MODERATING RELATIONSHIP OF COMPUTER SELF-EFFICACY ON PERFORMANCE IN A COMPUTER-SUPPORTED TASK

Every year, organizations invest a significant amount of resources in training and development programs, in the hope that these will have an important impact on employee growth and ultimately on organizational performance. Among many other possibilities, computer skills are the type of training most frequently provided by organizations. Rooted in Social Cognitive Theory, computer self-efficacy has been repeatedly identified as a key outcome of training, mediating the effects of a number of influences, such as training treatments, past experience and demographic variables, or personality characteristics and other individual differences, on performance, and affecting the latter both directly and through different motivational and affective mechanisms. For example, individuals displaying high levels of computer self-efficacy are expected to be more focused and persistent, put more effort into their endeavors and be more committed to achieving their goals, be more able to cope with negative feedback, and be generally less anxious about completing the task. While the impacts of computer self-efficacy on computer task-performance are well established, this important construct has not yet been incorporated into the nomological net attempting to explain performance in tasks requiring the use of computer technologies. Doing s