Knowledge that Transforms

Several studies support the positive link between information technology capability and firm performance, including Bharadwaj (2000) and Santhanam and Hartono (2003), which appeared in MIS Quarterly. We conducted a study to see if this link is still statistically significant. It is now over a decade since the first study was published, during which several significant developments in the IT industry have taken place. Unlike the 1990s, when proprietary information systems prevailed, the 2000s are characterized by more standardized and homogeneous information systems and with the rapid adoption of ERP and web technologies. Thus, we attempted to reexamine the link between IT capability and firm performance with data from the 2000s. Surprisingly, the results of our current analysis showed no significant link between IT capability and firm performance. Contrary to earlier studies, IT leader firms in our study didn’t show better financial performance than control firms. We discuss several possible causes for the change in findings and present an in-depth comparison in business performance between the two groups—IT leader and control—over a period extending from 1991 to 2007.

Organizational knowledge is one of the most important assets of an enterprise. Therefore, many organizations invest in enterprise social media (ESM) to establish electronic networks of practice and to foster knowledge exchange among employees. ESM improves interaction transparency and can be regarded as a sociotechnical system that provides a language for communication and symbolic action as well as a better sense of others’ social identity. Accordingly, the individual characteristics of knowledge seekers and contributors determine why and how interactions occur. However, existing studies tend to focus only on knowledge contributors’ characteristics and to treat knowledge as an object that needs to be transferred. To address this gap, this study conceptualizes and empirically tests a multilevel model of knowledge exchange in electronic networks of practice (ENoP) that includes the characteristics of knowledge seekers and knowledge contributors as well as their dyadic relationship from an activity-centered language/action point of view. A dataset of 15,505 enterprise microblogging messages reveals that knowledge seekers’ characteristics and relational factors drive knowledge exchanges in social media-enabled ENoP. Focusing on organizations with knowledge exchanges supported by information technology, our research extends prior findings by providing the first evidence that the communicative act expressed by question–answer pairs impacts the quality of knowledge exchanged.

A reliability generalization study (a meta-analysis of reliability coefficients) was conducted on three widely studied information systems constructs from the technology acceptance model (TAM): perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and behavioral intentions. This form of meta-analysis summarizes the reliability coefficients of the scores on a specified scale across studies and identifies the study characteristics that influence the reliability of these scores. Reliability is a critical issue in conducting empirical research as the reliability of the scores on well-established scales can vary with study characteristics, attenuating effect sizes. In conducting this study, an extensive literature search was conducted, with 380 articles reviewed and coded to perform reliability generalization. Study characteristics, including technology, sample, and measurement characteristics, for these articles were recorded along with effect size data for the relationships among these variables. After controlling for number of items, sample size, and sampling error, differences in reliability coefficients were found with several study characteristics for the three technology acceptance constructs. The reliability coefficients of PEOU and PU were lower in hedonic contexts than in utilitarian contexts, and were higher when the originally validated scales were used as compared to when other items were substituted. Only 27 percent of the studies that provided the measurement items used the original PEOU items, while 39 percent used the original PU items. Scales that were administered in English had higher reliability coefficients for PU and BI, with a marginal effect for PEOU. Reliability differences were also found for other study characteristics, including reliability type, subject experience, and gender composition. While average reliability coefficients were high, the results show that, on average, relationships among these constructs are attenuated by 12 percent with maximum attenuation in the range of 35 to 43 percent. Implications for technology acceptance research are discussed and suggestions for addressing variation in reliability coefficients across studies are provided.

The rise of social broadcasting technologies has greatly facilitated open access to information worldwide, not only by powering decentralized information production and consumption, but also by expediting information diffusion through social interactions like content sharing. Voluntary information sharing by users in the context of Twitter, the predominant social broadcasting site, is studied by modeling both the technology and user behavior. A detailed data set about the official content-sharing function on Twitter, called retweet, is collected and the statistical relationships between users’ social network characteristics and their retweeting acts are documented. A two-stage consumption-sharing model is then estimated using the conditional maximum likelihood estimatio (MLE) method. The empirical results convincingly support our hypothesis that weak ties (in the form of unidirectional links) are more likely to engage in the social exchange process of content sharing. Specifically, we find that after a median quality tweet (as defined in the sample) is consumed, the likelihood that a unidirectional follower will retweet is 3.1 percentage point higher than the likelihood that a bidirectional follower will do so.

This paper explores the effects of emotions embedded in a seller review on its perceived helpfulness to readers. Drawing on frameworks in literature on emotion and cognitive processing, we propose that over and above a well-known negativity bias, the impact of discrete emotions in a review will vary, and that one source of this variance is reader perceptions of reviewers’ cognitive effort. We focus on the roles of two distinct, negative emotions common to seller reviews: anxiety and anger. In the first two studies, experimental methods were utilized to identify and explain the differential impact of anxiety and anger in terms of perceived reviewer effort. In the third study, seller reviews from Yahoo! Shopping web sites were collected to examine the relationship between emotional review content and helpfulness ratings. Our findings demonstrate the importance of examining discrete emotions in online word-of-mouth, and they carry important practical implications for consumers and online retailers.

Using a mixed-methods approach, we develop the concept of perceived proximity, which is created through communication, shared identity, and the symbolic aspects thereof. Building on previous theoretical work, we create and validate measures of perceived proximity. Then, we compare how perceived proximity and objective distance relate to relationship quality for collocated and geographically dispersed work colleagues. Our results show that perceived proximity (i.e., a cognitive and affective sense of relational closeness) and not physical proximity (i.e., geographic closeness measured in miles or kilometers) affects relationship quality in an international survey of more than 600 people and 1,300 dyadic work relationships. We also find that people’s perceptions of proximity mediate the effects of communication and identification on relationship quality. Using qualitative data (2,289 comments from 1,188 respondents coded into 9 themes), we explore the symbolic meaning of perceived proximity. We show how people can form strong bonds despite being separated by large distances and continue to shift the emphasis from information systems as “pipes” or channels to information systems as vehicles for conveying shared meaning and symbolic value. Our findings have important implications for scholars, managers, systems designers, and members of virtual teams, teleworkers, and other geographically dispersed contexts.

Research examining the relationship between IT–business strategic alignment (hereafter referred to as alignment) and firm performance (hereafter referred to as performance) has produced apparently conflicting findings (i.e., an alignment paradox). To examine the alignment paradox, we conducted a meta-analysis that probed the interrelationships between alignment, performance, and context constructs. We found the alignment dimensions (intellectual, operational, and cross-domain) demonstrate unique relationships with the different performance types (financial performance, productivity, and customer benefit) and with many of the other constructs in alignment’s nomological network. All mean corrected correlations between dimensions of alignment and dependent variables were positive and most of the credibility interval values in these analyses were also positive. Overall, the evidence gathered from the extant literature suggests there is not much of an alignment paradox. This study contributes to the literature by clarifying the relationships between alignment and performance outcomes and offering insight into sources of inconsistencies in alignment research. By doing so, this paper lays a foundation for more consistent treatment of alignment in future IT research.

In this paper, we analyze patterns of transaction between individuals using data drawn from Kiva.org, a global online crowdfunding platform that facilitates prosocial, peer-to-peer lending. Our analysis, which employs an aggregate dataset of country-to-country lending volumes based on more than three million individual lending transactions that took place between 2005 and 2010, considers the dual roles of geographic distance and cultural differences on lenders’ decisions about which borrowers to support. While cultural differences have seen extensive study in the Information Systems literature as sources of friction in extended interactions, here, we argue and demonstrate their role in individuals’ selection of a transaction partner. We present evidence that lenders do prefer culturally similar and geographically proximate borrowers. An analysis of the marginal effects indicates that an increase of one standard deviation in the cultural differences between lender and borrower countries is associated with 30 fewer lending actions, while an increase of one standard deviation in physical distance is associated with 0.23 fewer lending actions. We also identify a substitution effect between cultural differences and physical distance, such that a 50 percent increase in physical distance is associated with an approximate 30 percent decline in the effect of cultural differences. Considering approaches to overcoming the observed cultural effect, we offer some empirical evidence of the potential of IT-based trust mechanisms, focusing on Kiva’s reputation rating system for microfinance intermediaries. We discuss the implications of our findings for prosocial lending, online crowdfunding, and electronic markets more broadly.

This paper explores value creation from government use of information technologies (IT). While the majority of studies in the information systems (IS) discipline have focused on discovering IT business value in for-profit organizations, the performance effects of IT in the public sector have not been extensively studied in either the IS or the public administration literature. We examine whether IT improves administrative efficiency in U.S. state governments. Utilizing IT budget data in state governments, the census data on state government expenditures, and a variety of information on public services that states provide, we measure technical efficiency with a stochastic frontier analysis and a translog cost function and estimate the effect of IT spending on efficiency. Our analyses provide evidence for a positive relationship between IT spending and cost efficiency and indicate that, on average, a $1 increase in per capita IT budget is associated with $1.13 in efficiency gains. This study contributes to the IS literature by expanding the scope of IT value research to public sector organizations and provides meaningful implications for elected officials and public sector managers.