A Note On Interpersonal And Communication Skills For Is Professionals: Evidence Of Positive Influence

A recent article by Byrd and Turner (2001) reported that interpersonal skills on the part of information systems personnel had a negative influence on the success of systems as measured by competitive advantage. Several reasons were forwarded to account for this unexpected result, including lack of richness in the measure of these skills, the use of strategic success measures, the true complexity of interpersonal relations within an organization, and the sample of CIOs who may have a bias in favor of technical skills. We address these concerns by incorporating a set of communication skills into the interpersonal skills set, sampling users for a different set of stakeholders, and employing a more complex model based on theories of expectation. The results indicate that the impacts of interpersonal skills on system success is not a simple function of the perceived level of the IS staff\u27s skill proficiency but is also determined by the understood expectations of skill requirements