Firms are increasing their investments in collaboration technologies in order to leverage the intellectual resources embedded in their employees. Research on post-adoption use of technology suggests that the true gains from such investments are realized when users explore various system features and attempt to incorporate them into their work practices. However, the literature has been silent about how to promote such behavior when individuals are embedded in team settings, where members’ actions are interdependent. This research develops a multilevel model that theorizes the cross-level influence of team empowerment on individual exploration of collaboration technology. Further, it identifies two cognitions—intention to continue exploring and expectation to continue exploring—that are oriented toward exploring ways to incorporate implemented technology into daily work routines over time. A 12-month field study of 212 employees in 48 organizational work teams was conducted to test the multilevel research model. The results provide support for the hypotheses, with team empowerment having a positive cross-level influence on intention to continue exploring and expectation to continue exploring and these, in turn, mediating the cross-level influence of team empowerment on individual exploration of collaboration technology.
Given the pervasive use of teams in organizations coupled with high levels of investment in collaboration technology, there is increasing interest in identifying factors that affect the exploration and use of a broader scope of system features so that firms can benefit from the use of such technology. Prior research has called for a deeper understanding of how managers can encourage greater innovation with technology in the workplace. Drawing on the team climate and technology use literatures, we identify team learning climate and team empowerment climate as key factors that affect employees' propensity to explore a new system's features. We develop and test our use in a field study involving 268 employees embedded in 56 work teams. Three main findings come out of this research. First, the results reveal that the two types of team climate differ in their cross-level effects on individual intention to explore, such that team learning climate promotes greater intention to explore, whereas team empowerment climate reduces employees' intention to explore the technology. In addition, we find that team learning climate and team empowerment climate interact in shaping individual intention to explore, such that the presence of a strong learning climate is more effective in promoting intention to explore when teams also have a strong empowerment climate. Second, the findings show that men and women are affected differently by team climate. We find that for men, team empowerment climate has no influence on intention to explore, whereas for women there is a significant negative cross-level effect. Finally, we find that intention to explore has a positive effect on usage scope, suggesting an important link between team climate, individual cognition, and the scope of features used by employees in team settings. Taken together, the model and results highlight the important role of team climate and gender-and the interplay between them-as drivers of technology feature exploration. Our findings, especially those related to team empowerment climate, are counterintuitive when compared to prior literature and offer useful insights for managers. On the one hand, managers should consider leveraging team learning climate to intrinsically stimulate employees to engage in exploration of technology. On the other hand, managers should be cautious and guard against saddling employees with too many additional responsibilities during the stages of exploration and experimentation with system features. It is possible that through an expanded set of responsibilities and expectations fostered by team empowerment climate, employees may be experiencing work overload, thus reducing their likelihood of exploring a broader set of technology features. Managers should be especially attentive to this based on the gender composition of their teams.
The article reports the results of a study which investigated social loafing in a team setting. The study involved 32 teams of students assigned to brainstorming tasks using group systems software. Cognitive mechanisms derived from moral disengagement theory were tested as possible drivers of social loafing behavior. These included attribution of blame, diffusion of responsibility, and dehumanization. All of these correlated with the effect of team size on social loafing, but only dehumanization was found to mediate the effect of dispersion.
In this paper, we draw on control theory to understand the conditions under which the use of agile practices is most effective in improving software project quality. Although agile development methodologies offer the potential of improving software development outcomes, limited research has examined how project managers can structure the software development environment to maximize the benefits of agile methodology use during a project. As a result, project managers have little guidance on how to manage teams who are using agile methodologies. Arguing that the most effective control modes are those that provide teams with autonomy in determining the methods for achieving project objectives, we propose hypotheses related to the interaction between control modes, agile methodology use, and requirements change. We test the model in a field study of 862 software developers in 110 teams. The model explains substantial variance in four objective measures of project quality—bug severity, component complexity, coordinative complexity, and dynamic complexity. Results largely support our hypotheses, highlighting the interplay between project control, agile methodology use, and requirements change. The findings contribute to extant literature by integrating control theory into the growing literature on agile methodology use and by identifying specific contingencies affecting the efficacy of different control modes. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our results.
Agency theory has served as a key basis for identifying drivers of offshore information system project success. Consequently, the role of relational factors in driving project success has been overlooked in this literature. In this paper, we address this gap by integrating the social embeddedness perspective and the culture literature to theorize how and why relational factors affect the success of offshore IS projects that are strategic in nature. We identify organizational and interpersonal cultural differences as critical success factors in this context. Using data from a longitudinal field study of 155 offshore IS projects managed by 22 project leaders, we found evidence of a relationship between hypothesized relational factors and two measures of offshore IS project success—namely, project cost overruns and client satisfaction—over and above the effects of project characteristics and agency factors. Specifically, we found that information exchange, joint problem solving, and trust reduce project cost overruns and improve client satisfaction. We also found a relationship between cultural differences at the organizational and team level, and offshore IS project success. The model explained 40 percent and 41 percent of the variance in project cost overruns and client satisfaction, respectively, for projects with a client representative. For projects with no client representative, the model explained 35 percent and 37 percent of the variance in project cost overruns and client satisfaction, respectively. Collectively, the results have important theoretical and practical implications for how client- vendor relationships should be managed when partnering with offshore firms and designing offshore IS project teams.
Employees' underutilization of new information systems undermines organizations' efforts to gain benefits from such systems. The two main predictors of individual-level system use in prior research--behavioral intention and facilitating conditions--have limitations that we discuss. We introduce behavioral expectation as a predictor that addresses some of the key limitations and provides a better understanding of system use. System use is examined in terms of three key conceptualizations: duration, frequency, and intensity. We develop a model that employs behavioral intention, facilitating conditions, and behavioral expectation as predictors of the three conceptualizations of system use. We argue that each of these three determinants play different roles in predicting each of the three conceptualizations of system use. We test the proposed model in the context of a longitudinal field study of 321 users of a new information system. The model explains 65 percent, 60 percent, and 60 percent of the variance in duration, frequency, and intensity of system use respectively. We offer theoretical and practical implications for our findings.
What differentiates successful from unsuccessful open source software projects? This paper develops and tests a model of the impacts of license restrictiveness and organizational sponsorship on two indicators of success: user interest in, and development activity on, open source software development projects. Using data gathered from Freshmeat.net and project home pages, the main conclusions derived from the analysis are that (1) license restrictiveness and organizational sponsorship interact to influence user perceptions of the likely utility of open source software in such a way that users are most attracted to projects that are sponsored by nonmarket organizations and that employ nonrestrictive licenses, and (2) licensing and sponsorship address complementary developer motivations such that the influence of licensing on development activity depends on what kind of organizational sponsor a project has. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, and the paper outlines several avenues for future research.