Why do people select the media they choose for a particular type of communication? The media choice literature has considered myriad contextual factors that influence media choice, from proximity of the communication partners, to the urgency of the situation, to time pressure, and so on. From this body of work, a contingency-based theory of media choice has emerged. An alternative approach is to investigate how communication strategies and media characteristics affect choice. We identified two approaches for investigating these issues: Te'eni's (2001) model of organizational communication and Dennis et al.'s (2008) media synchronicity theory. Using a scenario-based methodology, we asked respondents which medium they would use for a deceptive communication task and why they made that choice. We analyzed the data from the perspective of both the Te'eni and MST frameworks, enabling us to compare the extent to which each was able to explain our respondents' media choices. Both frameworks, at differing levels of communication granularity, suggest that the intent of the communication drives a strategy that ultimately informs media choice. The results suggest that the prior contingency-based explanations of media choice could be improved by not only understanding the intent of the communication, but also the strategy used by an individual to execute this communication. Additionally, we found that the more finely grained view of communication contained in MST explained more of the outcomes and was more parsimonious as well.
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.
The article discusses the paper "Inducing Sensitivity to Deception in Order to Improve Decision Making Performance: A Field Study," by David P. Biros, Joey F. George, and Robert W. Zmud.
Computer-based monitoring, the practice of collecting performance information on employees through the computers they use at work, continues to be a popular topic. How much is known about computer-based monitoring as it is practiced in the workplace? Unfortunately, very little, even though much has been written on the subject. This article reports on five case studies of organizations that employ computer-based monitoring to collect performance data on clerical workers. Although all five organizations utilize similar data collection methods and procedures, no two organizations use the data collected in the same ways to evaluate employee performance. Each site reports different levels of employee satisfaction with monitoring, different abilities of employees to balance demands for work quantity and quality, different levels of work-related illnesses, and different perceptions of supervision. Although these results do not appear surprising on the surface, much of the popular literature on computer-based monitoring stresses the negative effects of monitoring on workers, no matter how or where it is implemented. In this study, the simple presence of computer-based monitoring was not enough to explain differences between sites. Rather, other factors, such as which data were used for evaluation and outside economic pressures, helped to explain variations in monitoring and its effects across sites. Computer-based monitoring, like other information technologies, is a malleable technology.
Although various attempts have been made in the past to introduce office systems and office models, they have been limited in one or several ways: they have not been based on integrated views; no models were developed or the models were artificial; they have been limited in scope; they used restrictive representation schemes; they were not intelligent; they were not user-friendly. Our research attempts to address these issues with: an integrated view of the office; a model tied to the nature of office activity; integration across various office domains; and a knowledge base. Intelligence is supplied from the interface and from the planner, as well as from the domain knowledge. An important component of the domain knowledge is the functional structure which captures activity relationships with a uniform representation scheme. Users can access explanations about functions of the office and can add comments on them. The realization of these concepts in a prototype system is discussed.
Organizational decision support systems (ODSS) are a new type of decision support system (DSS) focusing on the organization rather than the individual or the group. In this paper, various conceptions of ODSS are reviewed, as are several architectures suggested for their construction. The paper ends with a discussion of the information technology on which ODSS can be based.
As organizational environments become more turbulent and as managers spend more time in meetings in an effort to deal with that turbulence, using information technology to support meetings has become more important. This paper reports on an experiment that compared meetings supported by information technology to meetings with conventional manual support only. The experiment differs from most previous group decision support system (GDSS) experiments in that solutions to the task it used could be objectively scored, it introduced assigned leadership as an independent variable, and it is the first GDSS experiment to compare use of a subset of the University of Arizona GroupSystems GDSS tools to manual group methods. In addition to a communication condition (GDSS or manual) and assigned leadership, the experiment also investigated the effects of anonymity on group process and outcomes. The experiment found that GDSS groups were less likely to reach consensus, took more time to reach a decision, and had more equal levels of member participation than manual groups. No main effects were found for assigned leadership or anonymity.
Various aspects of the design and use of Electronic Meeting Systems (EMS) have been investigated in laboratory and field studies, but until now no one has systematically investigated the role of EMS software on group performance. The current study compares two different EMS software tools in a controlled experiment. Dependent variables are decision quality, number of unique alternatives generated, satisfaction, and consensus. The study found that one software tool produced better quality solutions to a combination creativity and intellective task, but the other helped generate more unique alternatives. Each tool worked best on the task for which it was designed. The findings support the authors' premise that there should be a match between the EMS software tool and the task to be performed. The findings have several implications for the design of EMS software.
As managers spend more of their time in meetings, the study of information technology to support meetings becomes increasingly important. Several unique systems to support meetings electronically have been developed in industry and universities. The PLEXSYS systems at the University of Arizona have been operational since 1985 and are now being implemented in industrial sites. This article proposes and defines a new term for information technology systems that support group meetings: electronic meeting systems (EMS). EMS are more than group decision support systems (GDSS): they support more tasks than just decision making; they focus on communication. They move beyond the GDSS decision room, where groups must meet at the same time in the same place, to meetings that can be conducted across time and space. The article then presents a model of the EMS concept, which has three components: group process and outcomes; methods; and environment. Each of these components is explained in turn, and the implications derived from their study to date are discussed. Finally, the implementation of information technology for meeting support and its use in corporate settings will be addressed, as it has implications for productivity, meeting size, group member participation, and the role of the IS department.