This paper reports an analysis of the proportion of faculty publishing articles in premier business journals (i.e., the ratio of authors of premier business journal articles to total faculty of a discipline) across the disciplines of accounting, finance, management, marketing, and information systems (IS) for the years 1994─2003. This analysis revealed that over this period the management discipline had on average the highest proportion of faculty publishing in premier journals (12.7 authors per 100 management faculty), followed by finance (9.4 authors per 100 faculty), marketing (9.2 authors per 100 faculty), IS (5.5 authors per 100 faculty), and accounting (4.8 authors per 100 faculty). A further analysis examined these ratios for the different disciplines over time, finding that the ratios of authors to faculty have actually decreased for the disciplines of marketing and IS over this time period but have remained stable for the disciplines of accounting, management, and finance. Given steady growth in faculty size of all disciplines, the proportion of faculty publishing articles in premier journals in 2003 for all disciplines is lower than their 10-year averages, with IS having the lowest proportion in 2003. A sensitivity analysis reveals that without substantial changes that would allow more IS faculty to publish in the premier journals (e.g., by increasing publication cycles, number of premier outlets, and so on), IS will continue to lag far below the average of other disciplines. The implications of these findings for IS researchers, for institutions and administrators of IS programs, and for the IS academic discipline are examined. Based on these implications, recommendations for the IS discipline are presented.
The concept of collective efficacy within virtual teams has yet to be studied. This study developed and rigorously validated a domain-specific measure of collective efficacy, entitled virtual team efficacy, within a comprehensive research framework. Over a two-year period we collected field study data from multiple samples of information systems project teams--in all, 52 virtual teams comprising 318 students from the United States, Great Britain, and Hong Kong. As we hypothesized, group potency and computer collective efficacy act as antecedents to virtual team efficacy, and virtual team efficacy is in turn predictive of perceptual and objective measures of performance. Further, consistent with efficacy theory, we also find that virtual team efficacy acts on performance outcomes through specific mediating processes. This paper contributes to the academic and practitioner communities by providing a comprehensive model of virtual team efficacy and performance and by providing validated instrumentation that can be immediately applied during further research in this area.
What constitutes excellence in information systems research for promotion and tenure? This is a question that is regularly addressed by members of promotion and tenure committees and those called upon to write external letters. While there are many elements to this question, one major element is the quality and quantity of an individual's research publications. An informal survey of senior Information Systems faculty members at 49 leading U.S. and Canadian universities found 86 percent to expect three or more articles in elite journals. In contrast, an analysis of publication performance of Ph.D. graduates between the years of 1992 and 2004 found that approximately three individuals in each graduating year of Ph.D.s (about 2 percent) published 3 or more articles in a set of 20 elite journals within 6 years of graduation. Only 15 individuals from each graduating year (11 percent) published one or more articles. As a discipline, we publish elite journal articles at a lower rate than Accounting, yet our promotion and tenure standards are higher, similar to those of Management, Marketing, and Finance. Thus, there is a growing divergence between research performance and research standards within the Information Systems discipline. As such, unless we make major changes, these differences will perpetuate a vicious cycle of increasing faculty turnover, declining influence on university affairs, and lower research productivity. We believe that we must act now to create a new future, and offer recommendations that focus on the use of more appropriate standards for promotion and tenure and ways to increase the number of articles published.
This research explores how multimedia vividness and the use of computer-based social cues can influence involvement with technology and decision-making outcomes. An experiment is conducted that examines the effect that increased levels of vividness (text, voice, and animation) and decision aid personality have on decision-making involvement. In addition, the influence of two individual differences, gender and computer playfulness, on decision aid involvement are investigated. The cost-benefit framework of decision making and related research on consumer information processing provide the theoretical foundation for the study and suggest how increased involvement may influence decision making. Several decision-making outcomes are measured, including decision effort, decision quality, satisfaction with the decision aid, and understanding of the decision aid. Findings indicate that personality similarity (between the user and the decision aid) and computer playfulness result in increased involvement with the decision aid. In addition, women report higher levels of involvement with the decision aid. Increased levels of multimedia vividness are found to have a contradictory effect, with animation actually reducing involvement with the decision aid. The findings are discussed in terms of theoretical contributions and practical interface design implications.
This paper addresses facilitation, a developing area of Group Support Systems (GSS) research. The facilitator role is one of improving a group's communication and information flow; facilitators are meant to enhance the manner in which a group makes decisions without making those decisions for the group. However, there is a paradox in facilitation: The influence required to facilitate a group changes the group's outcomes. Additionally, strict impartiality for facilitation may be too much to expect because facilitators may unintentionally bias group outcomes, or because facilitators may have their own agendas. Acknowledgment, training, and standards for facilitators may prove useful ways for groups to retain the benefits of facilitation without incurring the costs of inappropriate facilitator influence. Implications are drawn for new research acknowledging the complexity of the GSS sociotechnical system, and the importance of sociotechnical facilitation in organizations.