ASSESSMENT OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY INFLUENCE ON STAFFS IN AWASH BANK

Abstract

The increasing competitive pressure resulting from technological development, globalization, changing customer demand has led to survival challenges of many banks in Ethiopia and demanded for improvement in quality of customer service and speed to enhance profitability, staff performance and cost reduction. Although many employees are using more of information communication technology as part of their jobs, there are studies that examine the general impact of Information and Communication Technology on organization performance but not on the staffs performance as a single unit. Specifically, the main objective of this study is to assess the influence of information and communication technology on the performance of staff in Ethiopian Banking Sector by placing a case at Awash Bank. The research mainly emphasis on the influence and other related factors that are caused by information and communication technology on the performance of staffs of the bank. Data was collected using hand delivery of questionnaire approach, which is the primary data. Additional information has also been gathered by placing an interview with selected Branch Managers. The study used purposive/ Judgmental sampling procedure in selecting the respondents as the sample. Out of total 290 Questionnaires distributed in the selected branches, 84.4% valid responses were gathered for further analysis. Frequency, Tabulation, Mean and Standard deviation are used for describing the results in the analysis part. The findings showed that there is an influence of Information and communication Technology on staffs at Awash Bank and also there are recognized contribution of using the technology which helps to understand the real benefits of the system. The overall implication of the study is that, Information and communication Technology adoption and introduction in the banking industry has resulted to increase in staff overall performance based on the technological factors, which has brought about increases in the skills of workers, staff productivity, communication rates and also help to reduce stress and workload within the bank. As a major recommendation, more improvement on the system is demanded to increase the staff’s productivity. Training and development on the system must be conducted to fully make use of the system. Also, if the system fails the bank should have a mechanism to operate on manual bases.