Despite a general consensus that use of information technology (IT) is an important link between IT investments and performance, the extant literature provides only a limited explanation as to when the use of IT lifts performance. We posit that the impact of knowledge management systems (KMS) usage is contingent on users' alternative sources of knowledge as well as their specific task environments. We investigate under what conditions repository KMS use leads to higher performance outcomes in a retail grocery context. We use a unique longitudinal dataset composed of objective measures of KMS use and sales performance of 273 managers over 146 weeks collected from a retail grocery chain. We obtain two main results. First, we find a diminishing impact of KMS use for managers who also use other sources of codified knowledge, namely physical or computerized alternative knowledge sources, whereas a complementary relationship seems to exist between KMS use and social sources of knowledge. Second, KMS use produces higher benefits for managers whose task environments require a greater volume of information and knowledge, but smaller benefits for those managers whose task environments demand rapidly changing information and knowledge. Our work contributes to both the IT business value and the KM literature by studying the contingent impact of IT usage while broadening the theoretical scope of the situated knowledge performance framework with a critical empirical test based on fine-grained objective and longitudinal data.
Online communities are increasingly important to organizations and the general public, but there is little theoretically based research on what makes some online communities more successful than others. In this article, we apply theory from the field of social psychology to understand how online communities develop member attachment, an important dimension of community success. We implemented and empirically tested two sets of community features for building member attachment by strengthening either group identity or interpersonal bonds. To increase identity-based attachment, we gave members information about group activities and intergroup competition, and tools for group-level communication. To increase bond-based attachment, we gave members information about the activities of individual members and interpersonal similarity, and tools for interpersonal communication. Results from a six-month field experiment show that participants' visit frequency and self-reported attachment increased in both conditions. Community features intended to foster identity-based attachment had stronger effects than features intended to foster bond-based attachment. Participants in the identity condition with access to group profiles and repeated exposure to their group's activities visited their community twice as frequently as participants in other conditions. The new features also had stronger effects on newcomers than on old-timers. This research illustrates how theory from the social science literature can be applied to gain a more systematic understanding of online communities and how theory-inspired features can improve their success.
Researchers and designers have been building awareness displays to improve the coordination of communication between distributed co-workers since the early 1990s. Awareness displays are technology designed to provide contextual information about the activities of group members. Most researchers have assumed that these displays improve the coordination of communication regardless of the relationship between the communicating parties. This article examines the conditions under which awareness displays improve coordination and the types of designs that most effectively support communication timing without overwhelming people with irrelevant information. Results from a pair of laboratory experiments indicate that awareness displays containing information about a remote collaborator's workload lead to communication attempts that are less disruptive, but only when the interrupter has incentives to be concerned about the collaborator's welfare. High-information awareness displays harmed interrupters' task performance, while abstract displays did not. We conclude that a display with an abstract representation of a collaborator's workload is optimal; it leads to better timing of interruptions without overwhelming the person viewing the display.
Social networks constructed on digital platforms are becoming increasingly pervasive in all aspects of individual and organizational life. This special issue of Information Systems Research includes 10 papers that focus on the interplay between digital and social networks. The interplay draws attention to the fact that digital interaction among individuals and organizations is almost always embedded in, influenced by, and in turn influences a social network. The papers in this special issue collectively shed light on the technical, behavioral, and economic challenges and implications of such networks and contribute to our understanding of how the power of such networks can be harnessed.
Coordination is important in software development because it leads to benefits such as cost savings, shorter development cycles, and better-integrated products. Team cognition research suggests that members coordinate through team knowledge, but this perspective has only been investigated in real-time collocated tasks and we know little about which types of team knowledge best help coordination in the most geographically distributed software work. In this field study, we investigate the coordination needs of software teams, how team knowledge affects coordination, and how this effect is influenced by geographic dispersion. Our findings show that software teams have three distinct types of coordination needs--technical, temporal, and process--and that these needs vary with the members' role; geographic distance has a negative effect on coordination, but is mitigated by shared knowledge of the team and presence awareness; and shared task knowledge is more important for coordination among collocated members. We articulate propositions for future research in this area based on our analysis.
Is the Internet a superhighway to information or a high-tech extension of the home telephone? We address this question by operationalizing information acquisition and entertainment as the use of the World Wide Web and interpersonal communication as the use of electronic mail (e-mail), and examine how 229 members of 110 households used these services during their first year on the Internet. The results show that e-mail drives people's use of the Internet. Participants used e-mail in more Internet sessions and more consistently than they used the World Wide Web, and they used e-mail first in sessions where they used both. Participants used the Internet more after they had used e-mail heavily, but they used the Internet less after they had used the Web heavily. While participants' use of both e-mail and the Web declined with time, the decline in Web use was steeper. Those who used e-mail more than they used the Web were also more likely to continue using the Internet over the course of a year. Our findings have implications for engineering and policies for the Internet and, more generally, for studies of the social impact of new technology.
Contingency theory predicts that using computer-mediated communication to accomplish complex collaborative work will be difficult, especially for tasks that require interactive, expressive communication. This proposition was examined in an experiment in which 67 three-person groups of MBA students completed two collaborative writing projects under either Computer Only, Computer + Phone or Face-to-Face communication conditions. The effects of these manipulations on group processes and performance were examined using data obtained from questionnaires and scores on the projects themselves. Although communication modality did not affect project performance, being restricted to computer-mediated communication made completing the work more difficult and diminished the participants' satisfaction with their work and with the other members of their work groups. The results also provide partial support for the idea that tasks that require more intensive communication, such as project planning, were more difficult than those that can be completed more independently, but this premise was not consistently confirmed. Taken together, these findings tend to confirm the contingency hypothesis regarding the difficulty of accomplishing work that involves ambiguous goals, multiple perspectives, and information that is susceptible to multiple interpretations without an interactive multiperson communication medium, such as face-to-face meetings. However, the results also suggest that modifications of contingency theory are required to incorporate the evidence that individuals can, to some extent, adapt to restricted communication channels. Further research designed to examine patterns of adaptation under various task/technology combinations is recommended.