Knowledge that Transforms

Although researchers have examined the role of dyadic dynamics (i.e., interactions between the acquirer and the target firm) in the success of acquisitions, little attention has been devoted to the role of information technology (IT). In this study, we extend this literature by examining how pre-acquisition IT distance (i.e., the difference between the enterprise IT systems of the two firms that reflects the system incompatibility and resulting costs of system integration) affects the acquirer’s post-acquisition performance. To measure IT distance, we used a word-embedding technique to map each firm’s IT systems portfolio to a low-dimensional embedding space and calculate the distance between the firms in that space. Using data on U.S. firms’ acquisition activities over seven years, we found that IT distance is negatively associated with the acquirer’s post-acquisition performance. Also, the adverse effect of IT distance is stronger for acquisitions motivated by operational synergies, compared to those seeking non-operational synergies. This finding supports our fundamental premise that IT distance disrupts post-acquisition synergy creation, and more so when the combined firm has a greater need for tight integration to create acquisition synergies. This research contributes to the merger and acquisition (M&A) literature in management and IS by introducing a novel concept of IT distance and by theorizing and empirically examining its performance implications in acquisitions. The findings of this study can inform practitioners on how to devise IT strategies in corporate acquisitions to mitigate IT risks and achieve greater post-acquisition performance.

Contemporary IT project teams demand that individual members generate and implement novel ideas in response to the dynamic changes in IT and business requirements. Firms rely on multidisciplinary, geographically distributed IT project teams to gather the necessary talent, regardless of their locations, for developing novel IT artifacts. In this team context, individuals are expected to leverage dissimilar others’ expertise for creating ideas during idea generation (IG) and then implement their ideas during idea implementation (II), known as the IGII process. Although much has been done to explain individual creativity, the extant literature offers little theoretical understanding on how to address the double-edged effects of dispersions in both functional expertise (ExpDisp) and geographical locations (GeoDiss)—the two defining characteristics of multi-disciplinary, cross-locational IT project teams—on individual creativity and subsequent performance. Drawing on the IGII framework, we propose transactive memory systems (TMSs) as a plausible team-level solution to tackle the challenge. With a multi-wave multi-level dataset from 141 members and their supervisors from 35 IT project teams, we found that team-level TMS and GeoDiss interactively moderate individual-level IGII processes in multi-disciplinary geographically -distributed IT project teams during both II and IG, but in qualitatively different ways.

Entitlement has been identified as a potentially valuable employee characteristic in the prediction of computer abuse but has not been studied systematically in the IS domain. We introduce the construct of technological entitlement as the persistent sense of being more deserving of technological resources, uses, and privileges compared to other employees. Adapting a model of general entitlement to the work technology context, we theorize that technological entitlement predicts computer abuse and that this relationship is amplified by perceptions of technology restriction. After developing and validating a scale to measure technological entitlement, we conduct three studies with working adult samples to test our hypotheses. In Study 1 (n = 187), using a behavioral design, we find that technological entitlement predicts computer abuse behavior (beyond general entitlement) and that this relationship is stronger when employees perceive organizational restrictions on technology usage. We replicate these findings in Study 2 (n = 339) with an experiment. In Study 3 (n = 156), we manipulate the context of restrictiveness within our experimental vignette to establish the generalizability of our moderator. We discuss how technological entitlement helps explain existing inconsistencies in the effectiveness of deterrence measures as well as other theoretical and practical implications of our work.

Realizing or appropriating value from individual firm-level IT investments has been a recurring theme in the IS literature for decades. Further, failure rates related to IT investments have been high for many years. However, realizing value from IT in settings where numerous organizations need to work together to co-develop sizable digital platforms has been undertheorized and/or hobbled with conflated theoretical constructs. To address this dearth of novel theory and accompanying empiricism, high-quality processes such as benefits management have been suggested in the scientific literature and have gained substantial interest in practice as a means for organizations to structure their routines and processes in ways that actually capture value. The complexity of this challenge suggests that there should be a renewed theoretical effort in IS to reconceptualize several extant scholarly streams. We address this challenge first by deconstructing traditional scholarly frameworks into a moderated theoretical model of multi-creation and multi-realization of IT value termed “MUIT.” The first construct in the model is based on the resource-based view; then, the model is further informed by appropriation theory, adaptive structuration theory, network governance theory, and, finally, the benefits management literature. Our variance model is a Type IV theory according to Gregor’s typology—a theory for explaining and predicting how large-scale strategic consortia can collaborate to realize greater value from IT than they could in isolation. Regarding praxis, we contribute to the understanding of how interorganizational resources and capabilities, relationships, and value realization can be spring-boarded into both successful large-scale platforms and superior realization of benefits.

Many information technology (IT) projects in the U.S. federal government have been plagued with failures and overruns in recent years, wasting a large amount of tax revenues and undermining the public’s confidence in the government’s ability to manage such resources and deliver on its commitments. What affects the performance of IT projects in the federal government? We find that prior literature on IT project management from the private sector setting is inadequate to answer this question. In addition, to the best of our knowledge, information systems (IS) research thus far has not considered how the decision-making authority of an IT unit influences IT project performance at the organizational level. We leverage several unique characteristics of the public sector, vis-à-vis for-profit firms, in developing our theory and hypothesis. Utilizing official datasets on IT projects and human resource records, we find that the more IT managerial officials and supervisors a federal bureau has, the lower time overruns it experiences in its IT projects. Interestingly, this relationship is weakened when the bureau has a larger number of ongoing IT projects. Our findings offer new theoretical insights for the IT project management literature and provide meaningful policy insights into government IT management.

Novel information technologies (ITs), such as mobile devices and third-party cloud services, offer users an increasing variety of action possibilities, i.e., affordances. Organizational IT policies, however, often specify their actualization—i.e., turning those affordances into action—as undesired. Organizations face the challenge that to reach their goals, employees still frequently take advantage of these affordances by using undesired ITs and thereby deviate from IT policies. Although prior work has extensively studied how goal-oriented users actualize affordances that are associated with outcomes that support organizational goals, little attention has been paid to the structures, mechanisms, and conditions underlying affordances that deviate from organizational IT policies. We conceptualize these affordances as deviant affordances. Leveraging the orders of change framework and using a multimethod research design integrating interview and experimental studies, we identify three key mechanisms underlying deviant affordances—i.e., tension, deadlock, and actualization mechanisms—that can link together to produce a deviant outcome supporting both the users’ individual goal and an organizational goal. Our work explains the importance of users’ perceived deadlock in stimulating the generation of deviant outcomes that support organizational goals through improving task, contextual, and innovative job performance.

Trust violations of online sellers are widely reported in customer reviews and are often ascribed to the sellers’ lack of integrity. These reported violations reduce potential customers’ trust in the accused sellers, given the critical role of seller integrity in e-commerce. However, accused sellers and buyers often dispute the ascriptions of trust violations (e.g., sellers may argue that a violation is due to their lack of competence instead of their integrity). The trust repair literature has inadequately focused on effective strategies to repair reported integrity-based trust violations in ascription disputes. Drawing upon attribution theory and individuals’ cognitive sensemaking process regarding trust violations, we propose an account-based approach through re-ascription and stability attributions, enabling accused sellers to repair potential customers’ trust in them in the event of such disputes. We theorize the effectiveness of this approach by considering the contingent role of the accused seller’s reputation. The results of our laboratory experiments confirm the effectiveness of our approach in repairing potential customers’ trust for sellers with a high reputation but not for sellers with a low reputation. We further investigate the effectiveness of disclosing substantive amends (i.e., financial compensation) made by the accused seller to the victim as an alternative approach to repairing potential customers’ trust in sellers with a low reputation. The results reveal the significant effects of disclosing substantive amends on repairing potential customers’ trust in the seller, regardless of the seller’s reputation.

We study the potential impact of the legal vulnerability created by ubiquitous information technology (IT) and provide insights into its unintended consequences in a typical healthcare screening context. Screening policies determine the level of care provision (i.e., whether to conduct a test) based on patient risk information. If IT shares risk information with physicians in the testing stage, follow-up decisions may be more accurate. Yet, physicians may also face heightened legal risk from increased information visibility. In this context, we examine the socially optimal screening (based on risk information) and follow-up policies (based on risk and test information). Litigation is generally associated with the overutilization of health care because of physicians’ defensive medicine practices. In contrast, we find that the strategic underprovisioning of health care through screening policies could be a consequence of information sharing in the presence of litigation concerns. The underprovisioning of health care is aggravated if the precision of risk information relative to that of the medical test increases or the physician becomes more self-interested and less patient oriented. However, limits on malpractice damages can alleviate the underprovisioning of health care.

Information systems (IS) are complex and effortful, placing ever-greater demands on humans’ executive functions. Executive functions, general-purpose control processes that regulate one’s thoughts and behaviors, are the subject of growing investigation in cognitive psychology. The present research examines the relationship between individuals’ executive functions and IS learning. Using neuropsychological methods from cognitive psychology, we measured three key dimensions of executive functions: working memory, shifting, and inhibition. Two empirical studies were conducted. Study 1 tested the relationship between executive functions and IS learning in a self-paced offline learning environment. Study 2 replicated Study 1 and extended it to include a comparison of two self-paced online learning methods: behavior modeling and text-based learning. Both studies found significant effects of executive functions on IS learning after controlling for known IS learning determinants. Study 2 also showed that declarative knowledge was higher for behavior modeling than for text-based learning. Overall, our research highlights the influence of executive functions on IS learning. This research advances knowledge about determinants of IS learning and opens important research avenues for gaining deeper insights into cognitive mechanisms underlying effective IS learning.