Abstract:
The purposes of this research are1) to study the causes, the operational aspects, and the development of self-efficacy of the employees working in virtual organizations; 2) to develop and examine the appropriateness of the self-efficacy measurement model and the empirical data; 3) to study the levels of self-efficacy of the employees; 4) to compare the self-efficacy of the employees who were different in gender, age, working period, and educational background; 5) to develop and examine the development of self-efficacy measurement model and the empirical data; 6) to examine both direct and indirect effects of self-efficacy of the employees; 7) to compare the self-efficacy of the employees who were in the control group and the four experimental groups; 8) to compare the self-efficacy of the employees in the control group and one experimental group.
For the first research objective, twelve self-efficacy experts, administrators, and officers attended in the semi-structure interview. The samples of the second research objective were 80 employees working in the virtual organizations, and the data from 454 employees were collected to answer research questions three to six. For research objectives 7 and 8, the experiment was conducted with 50 and 20 students at King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok, Thailand respectively. They volunteered to participate in this research by playing a role as employees working in a virtual organization.
The findings were as follows: 1) the causes that made the usual organizations intend to work as virtual organizations were that they would like to reduce the high office rental expenses and to increase working efficiency. For the operational aspects, the employees could work both inside and outside a company with technology system support for communication. Moreover, the experts, administrators, and employees working in the virtual organizations agreed that the methods to develop the employees perceptions on self-efficacy were to inform the objectives of the operations in advance, to train them how to work and gain some experiences in operations, to have supervisors to take care of them, give suggestions, solve problems, and give moral support by giving feedback after performance appraisal. With these methods, the employees would increase their self-efficacy; 2) the factor analysis illustrated that the self-efficacy measurement model was in accordance with the empirical data as the Chi-Square Goodness of Fit = 165.45 (df = 138, p = .055) GFI = 0.97 AGFI = 0.94 and RMSEA = 0.055 ;3) the employees self-efficacy was at a moderate level, and the employees self-efficacy toward self-related situations was rather high; 4) the comparison of the self-efficacy of employees with the differences of gender, age, working period, and educational background was statistically significant; 5) the development of self-efficacy measurement model was in accordance with the empirical data with Chi-Square Goodness of Fit = 164.62 (df = 139, p = .068) GFI = 0.97 AGFI = 0.93 RMSEA = 0.020 ;6) the perceptions of the self-efficacy level of the employees were directly influenced by the mastery of experiences, which the value of the direct effect was 1.00 with the statistical significance. Besides, the self-esteem level was indirectly influenced by anxiety, which the value of the indirect effect was -0.70 with the statistical significance ; 7) According to the perceptions on the self-efficacy of the four experimental groups: the group of employees with mastery of experiences in operations, the group of employees treating with the operation model, the group of employees receiving supervisors verbal persuasion, and the group of employees receiving supervisors positive feedback, it was found that the average post-test scores of the four experimental groups were higher than the control group without statistical differences; 8) For the perceptions on self-efficacy toward the assigned jobs of the employees who were in the experimental group receiving the four independent variables: mastery of experiences in operations, operation model, supervisors verbal persuasion, and supervisors positive feedback, it was found that the average post-test score of the experimental group was higher than the control group with statistical differences.