With the rapidly evolving permeation of digital technologies into everyday human life, we are witnessing an era of personal data digitalization. Personal data digitalization refers to the sociotechnical encounters associated with the digitization of personal data for use in digital technologies. Personal data digitalization is being applied to central attributes of human life—health, cognition, and emotion—with the purported aim of helping individuals live longer, healthier lives endowed with the requisite cognition and emotion for responding to life situations and other people in a manner that enables human flourishing. A concern taking hold in manifold fields ranging from IT, bioethics, and law, to philosophy and religion is that as personal data digitalization permeates ever more areas of human existence, humans risk becoming artifacts of technology production. This concern brings to center stage the very notion of what it means to be human, a notion encapsulated in the term human dignity, which broadly refers to the recognition that human beings possess intrinsic value and, as such, are endowed with certain rights and should be treated with respect. In this paper, we identify, describe, and transform what we know about personal data digitalization into a higher order theoretical structure around the concept of human dignity. The result of our analysis is the CARE (claims, affronts, response, equilibrium) theory of dignity amid personal data digitalization, a theory that explains the relationship of personal data digitalization to human dignity. Building upon the CARE theory as a foundation, researchers in a variety of IS research streams could develop mid-range theories for empirical testing or could use the CARE theory as an overarching lens for interpreting emerging IS phenomena. Practitioners and government agencies can also use the CARE theory to understand the opportunities and risks of personal data digitalization and to develop policies and systems that respect the dignity of employees and citizens.

An understanding of culture is important to the study of information technologies in that culture at various levels, including national, organizational, and group, can influence the successful implementation and use of information technology. Culture also plays a role in managerial processes that may directly, or indirectly, influence IT. Culture is a challenging variable to research, in part because of the multiple divergent definitions and measures of culture. Notwithstanding, a wide body of literature has emerged that sheds light on the relationship of IT and culture. This paper sets out to provide a review of this literature in order to lend insights into our understanding of the linkages between IT and culture. We begin by conceptualizing culture and laying the groundwork for a values-based approach to the examination of IT and culture. Using this approach, we then provide a comprehensive review of the organizational and cross-cultural IT literature that conceptually links these two traditionally separate streams of research. From our analysis, we develop six themes of IT-culture research emphasizing culture’s impact on IT, IT’s impact on culture, and IT culture. Building upon these themes, we then develop a theory of IT, values, and conflict. Based upon the theory, we develop propositions concerning three types of cultural conflict and the results of these conflicts. Ultimately, the theory suggests that the reconciliation of these conflicts results in a reorientation of values. We conclude with the particular research challenges posed in this line of inquiry.

Knowledge is a broad and abstract notion that has defined epistemological debate in western philosophy since the classical Greek era. In the past few years, however, there has been a growing interest in treating knowledge as a significant organizational resource. Consistent with the interest in organizational knowledge and knowledge management (KM), IS researchers have begun promoting a class of information systems, referred to as knowledge management systems (KMS). The objective of KMS is to support creation, transfer, and application of knowledge in organizations. Knowledge and knowledge management are complex and multi-faceted concepts. Thus, effective development and implementation of KMS requires a foundation in several rich literatures. To be credible, KMS research and development should preserve and build upon the significant literature that exists in different but related fields. This paper provides a review and interpretation of knowledge management literatures in different fields with an eye toward identifying the important areas for research. We present a detailed process view of organizational knowledge management with a focus on the potential role of information technology in this process. Drawing upon the literature review and analysis of knowledge management processes, we discuss several important research issues surrounding the knowledge management processes and the role of IT in support of these processes.

To use information technology to improve learning processes, the pedagogical assumptions underlying the design of information technology for educational purposes must be understood. This paper reviews different models of learning, surfaces assumptions of electronic teaching technology, and relates those assumptions to the differing models of learning. Our analysis suggests that initial attempts to bring information technology to management education follow a classic story of automating rather than transforming. IT is primarily used to automate the information delivery function in classrooms. In the absence of fundamental changes to the teaching and learning process, such classrooms may do little but speed up ineffective processes and methods of teaching. Our mapping of technologies to learning models identifies sets of technologies in which management schools should invest in order to informate up and down and ultimately transform the educational environment and processes. For researchers interested in the use of information technology to improve learning processes, the paper provides a theoretical foundation for future work.

Organizations in many different industries employ virtual teams in a variety of contexts, including research and development, customer support, software development, and product design. Many virtual teams are geographically and culturally dispersed in order to facilitate around-the-clock work and to allow the most qualified individuals to be assigned to a project team. As such dispersion increases, virtual teams tend to experience greater and more diverse conflict compared to co-located teams. Since the dynamics of virtual team leadership are not yet well understood, research that examines how team leaders alleviate threats to team cohesion and provide strategies for conflict resolution makes significant contributions to the literature. Our study uses a survey-based methodology to examine the perceptions of 159 virtual team members employed by a large U.S. telecommunications corporation and five Korean firms involved in construction, finance, business consulting, sales, and distribution. The study integrates the dynamic model of conflict in distributed teams with the behavioral complexity in leadership theory to investigate the roles that virtual team leaders must effectively employ to reduce various forms of virtual team conflict. Our findings indicate that communication technologies are effective in reducing task conflict; however, the team leader may also mitigate task conflict by assuming the role of monitor. Likewise, process conflict may be abated in the virtual team as the leader performs coordinator activities. An effective virtual team leader exhibits specific roles to manage different types of conflict and the leader's response to conflict plays an important part in virtual team success.

This paper explores the challenges of creating and maintaining trust in a global virtual team whose members transcend time, space, and culture. The challenges are highlighted by integrating recent literature on work teams, computer-mediated communication groups, cross-cultural communication, and interpersonal and organizational trust. To explore these challenges empirically, we report on a series of descriptive case studies on global virtual teams whose members were separated by location and culture, were challenged by a common collaborative project, and for whom the only economically and practically viable communication medium was asynchronous and synchronous computer-mediated communication. The results suggest that global virtual teams may experience a form of “swift” trust, but such trust appears to be very fragile and temporal. The study raises a number of issues to be explored and debated by future research. Pragmatically, the study describes communication behaviors that might facilitate trust in global virtual teams.

Managerial decision making is regarded as among the most important functions of senior managers. The presence of easily accessible, reliable information contributes to effective decision making. Sources of information may be oral, written, or computer-based. The computer-based information sources remain the least studied in the context of executive decision making because executives have tended to use other managers and their own intuition as their primary information sources. Recently though, computer-based information systems directly tailored for use by executives have begun to be implemented within organizations. Such systems, referred to as Executive Information Systems, may help executives make faster and higher quality decisions, an increasingly important requirement for executives given such trends as globalization and heightened competition. This study uses survey responses of 91 high level managers to empirically examine the relationship of executive information system use by managers with decision making speed, problem identification speed, information availability, and the involvement of subordinates in decision making. The study found that when used frequently and over time, executive information systems are positively related to perceived problem identification and decision making speed for senior and middle managers. Whether such effects lead to higher quality decisions are topics for further study. In addition, the frequency of use of executive information systems is shown to be related to a perceived increase in information availability although the length of time the system is in use is not related to perceived information availability. This suggests that the information needs of senior and middle managers is malleable and systems designed to support the decision making of managers need to be flexible to adapt to changing information needs. Lastly, the study found that the use of executive information systems does not reduce the reliance of senior or middle managers on their subordinates to help in decision making. This may be because the involvement of subordinates does not necessarily connote a consistent positive or negative behavior among American managers, whereas speed and information are consistently considered as positive. The implications of the results for a previously developed theory of the effects of advanced information technology on organizational design, intelligence, and decision making are discussed.