Information systems development (ISD) projects are prone to high levels of failure. One of the major reasons attributed to these failures is the inability to harmonize values held by a diverse set of participants in an environment that is characterized by uncertainty due to changing requirements. In this paper, we focus on a relational approach to achieve congruence between a project manager and a team member with respect to influence tactics. Constructs of perceptual congruence and communication congruence that reflect a level of agreement and degree of shared understanding between the project manager and team members are described. A congruence model is constructed and tied to an intermediate outcome variable of control loss. One hundred and thirteen dyadic pairs of project managers and team members are surveyed in order to test the model. The results indicate that having strong relational equity and common understanding can minimize control loss. It is important to consider the perspectives of both the project manager and a team member while formulating and assessing monitoring strategies to promote the success of an ISD project. Especially, encouraging team members to discuss disagreements constructively can motivate them to perform better and keep things under control. Finally, it is critical to address the performance problems as they occur rather than wait until the completion of the project.
Although it has been argued that knowledge is an important organizational resource, little research has investigated where individuals go to search for information or knowledge. Prior work has investigated sources in isolation, but in an organizational setting, sources are encountered as an open portfolio instead of in isolation. It is important to understand how individuals perceive the wide array of sources available to them and how those perceptions affect their use of different types of sources. Building on prior work, this research looks at factors underlying the selection of sources that require direct interpersonal contact (relational sources) and those that do not (nonrelational sources) and explores factors that differentially affect the use of these types of sources. A sample of 204 working professionals recruited from graduate business studies was used to test hypotheses regarding the effects of accessibility and quality, as well as comparisons and trade-offs between relational and nonrelational sources. Consistent with prior work, source accessibility and quality significantly affect usage of a source. This relationship, however, is moderated by the type of source with accessibility having less effect on the use of relational sources. Furthermore, use of each type of source was also affected by the perceived accessibility and quality of alternative types of sources. Together these results highlight the importance of simultaneously considering the relational and nonrelational sources available to individuals. These results also have implications for the design and implementation of systems for managing information and knowledge assets.
Although its popularity is widespread, the Web is well known for one particular drawback: its frequent delay when moving from one page to another. This experimental study examined whether delay and two other website design variables (site breadth and content familiarity) have interaction effects on user performance,attitudes, and behavioral intentions. The three experimental factors (delay, familiarity, and breadth) collectively impact the cognitive costs and penalties that users incur when making choices in their search for target information. An experiment was conducted with 160 undergraduate business majors in a completely counterbalanced, fully factorial design that exposed them to two websites and asked them to browse the sites for nine pieces of information. Results showed that all three factors have strong direct impacts on performance and user attitudes,in turn affecting behavioral intentions to return to the site, as might be expected. A significant three-way interaction was found between all three factors indicating that these factors not only individually impact a user's experiences with a website, but also act in combination to either increase or decrease the costs a user incurs. Two separate analyses support an assertion that attitudes mediate the relationship of the three factors on behavioral intentions. The implications of these results for both researchers and practitioners are discussed. Additional research is needed to discover other factors that mitigate or accentuate the effects of delay, other effects of delay, and under what amounts of delay these effects occur.