To understand the impact of social capital on knowledge integration and performance within digitally enabled teams, we studied 46 teams who had a history and a future working together. All three dimensions of their social capital (structural, relational, and cognitive) were measured prior to the team performing two tasks in a controlled setting, one face-to-face and the other through a lean digital network. Structural and cognitive capital were more important to knowledge integration when teams communicated through lean digital networks than when they communicated face-to-face; relational capital directly impacted knowledge integration equally, regardless of the communication media used by the team. Knowledge integration, in turn, impacted team decision quality, suggesting that social capital influences team performance in part by increasing a team's ability to integrate knowledge. These results suggest that team history may be necessary but not sufficient for teams to overcome the problems with the use of lean digital networks as a communication environment. However, team history may present a window of opportunity for social capital to develop, which in turn allows teams to perform just as well as in either communication environment.
This study examines the antecedents of turnover intention among information technology road warriors. Road warriors are IT professionals who spend most of their workweek away from home at a client site. Building on Moore's (2000) work on turnover intention, this article develops and tests a model that is context-specific to the road warrior situation. The model highlights the effects of work--family conflict and job autonomy, factors especially applicable to the road warrior's circumstances. Data were gathered from a company in the computer and software services industry. This study provides empirical evidence for the effects of work--family conflict, perceived work overload, fairness of rewards, and job autonomy on organizational commitment and work exhaustion for road warriors. The results suggest that work--family conflict is a key source of stress among IT road warriors because they have to juggle family and job duties as they work at distant client sites during the week. These findings suggest that the context of the IT worker matters to turnover intention, and that models that are adaptive to the work context will more effectively predict and explain turnover intention.
Grounded in the theory of trying, this study examines the influence of the work environment and gender on trying to innovate with information technology. The study extends the innovation diffusion literature by offering a theory-driven explanation for examining trying to innovate with IT and a parsimonious measure for this construct. Drawing on the theory of reasoned action, we argue that work environment impediments render intentions inadequate for examining post-adoption IT use. Instead of examining intentions, we introduce the goal-based construct of trying to innovate with IT as an appropriate dependent variable for examining post-adoption IT use. Statistical analysis supports the reliability and validity of a parsimonious measure of trying to innovate with IT. The study focuses on two research questions. First, do perceptions of the work environment such as overload and autonomy influence individuals' trying to innovate with IT? Second, does gender influence the relationship between perceptions of the environment and trying to innovate with IT? The model articulates how perceptions of the environment moderated by gender may influence trying to innovate with IT. Results provide evidence that overload and autonomy are antecedents to trying to innovate with information technology. Further, findings confirm that autonomy interacts with overload to determine trying to innovate with IT and that these relationships vary by gender. Implications for research and practice are offered.