Designing Interfaces with Social Presence: Using Vividness and Extraversion to Create Social Recommendation Agents

Interfaces now employ a variety of media-rich, social, and advanced decision-making components, including recommendation agents (RA) designed to assist users with their tasks. Social presence has been identified as a key consideration in website design to overcome the lack of warmth, social cues, and face-to-face interaction, but few studies have investigated the interface features that may increase social presence. Recent research on RAs has similarly acknowledged social presence as a key factor in the design of online RAs and in building trust in this technology, but there has been limited empirical work on the topic. In this study an experiment was conducted to explore how social technology cues, media capabilities, and individual differences influence social presence and trust in an RA. RA personality (extraversion), vividness (text, voice, and animation), and computer playfulness were found to influence social presence, with social presence serving in a mediating role and increasing user trust in the RA. Vividness also had a moderating effect on the relationship between RA extraversion and social presence such that increased levels of vividness strengthen this relationship

Hype or Help? A Longitudinal Field Study of Virtual World Use for Team Collaboration

Despite increasing organizational interest and investment in virtual worlds (VWs), there is a lack of research on the benefits of VWs. When and how does the use of VW systems engender better organizational outcomes than traditional collaborative technologies? This paper investigates the value of VWs for team collaboration. Team collaboration is particularly relevant in studying VWs given the rich interactive nature of VWs and an increasing organizational reliance on virtual teamwork. To understand the value of VW use for team collaboration, we examine the relationship between a team’s disposition toward IT, their general disposition (personality) and VW use in influencing team cohesion and performance. We conducted a field study that compares two collaborative technology systems – one that is based on a traditional desktop metaphor and one that is grounded in the principles of a virtual world. We tracked the use of the systems for one year. We analyzed data at the team level and the results generally support our model, with agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, openness, and computer self-efficacy interacting with time and technology type to positively influence team technology use. We also found that the use of the virtual world system positively influenced the relationship between technology use and team cohesion, which, in turn, predicts team performance. The model explains 57 percent, 21 percent, and 24 percent of the variance in team technology use, team cohesion, and team performance, respectively

Factors Influencing Tourists’ Travel Experience Sharing on Social Media

As travel-related content of tourist experiences benefits for both tourists to consume information online and for companies by providing insight into how visitors perceive their services, it becomes critical to understand the antecedents of travel experience sharing on social media. The study aims to develop a model of overall satisfaction, perceived enjoyment, motivations, and inhibitor toward sharing travel experiences, where personality factors impact overall satisfaction and perceived enjoyment. Partial Least Squares analysis was performed to evaluate the last experience of 169 Indonesian tourists in Bandung. The study discovers that conscientiousness and openness to experience trait is significant predictor of overall experience satisfaction, and only extraversion trait is identified as a significant predictor of perceived enjoyment. When it comes to predicting travel experience sharing on social media, overall satisfaction, perceived enjoyment, personal fulfillment, and self-actualization reasons have been significant predictors, but altruistic motivations and security and privacy concerns have not. Destination managers should be aware of different travelers’ personalities that could impact their satisfaction and perceived enjoyment, influencing their sharing experience behavior. Personalized service and promotion can increase contributors to sharing travel-related content on social media. Keywords: personality traits, overall satisfaction, perceived enjoyment, travel experience sharing, PLS-SE

The Role of Social Media Engagement and Emotional Intelligence in Successful Employment

Purpose This paper focusses on demonstrating the role of social media engagement and considering emotional intelligence (hereafter EI) as a critical concept to successful employment, mainly when individuals fail to reach the desired employment despite “meeting” the role requirements. Design/methodology/approach The authors adopted a qualitative approach through semi-structured in-depth interviews of some randomly selected university students in the UK, young adults aged 19–32. The participants were selected based on different demographics to provide a broader and less biased representation of young adults in the UK. Findings This research suggests that recruitment organisations should introduce the latest requirements and trends of employers to ensure that the expectations of employers and potential candidates are aligned to improve the employment rate in young adults. Originality/value This research extends the literature regarding EI in social media engagement and successful employment. It also brings new perspectives on successful employment in young adults by demonstrating the role of social media engagement and EI traits leading to a conceptual framework exploring successful employment based on the role of social media engagement and EI

Identity Management in Permanent Digital Spaces

Social media platforms have captured and transformed the social experience. Though media content is unique for each platform, all social media sites share some level of anonymity, asynchronous communication, and absence of non-verbal social cues. This environment provides a landscape where users can not only exercise a more conscious management and presentation of self, but are also able to explore creative identity formation processes. This study investigates the ways that users engage with social media platforms and the impact such engagement has on personal identity management. Methods consisted of distributing a personality inventory based on the widely accepted NEO-P-IR. Participants were also asked to self-report their current social media habits including which platform they use most frequently, and an approximation of the cumulative time they spend using all social media sites. A subset of those respondents participated in interviews that explored their responses deeper. Data suggests that social media users will maintain accounts on both an identifiable and more anonymous platform, using each site for different identity performances. Qualitative analyses have yielded usage themes such as: ease of relationship maintenance, political signaling, and information seeking. Because social media is used by a large percentage of the global population, it is crucial that the growing field of cyberpsychology continues research into the motivations of social media users to engage in content creation

A Little Difference Makes A Big Difference: Essays On The Link Between Top Management Team Traits And Strategic Marketing Decisions

The importance of marketing is growing. This is not just a perception: CEOs appear to see its importance as well. Despite the increase in the understood importance of marketing, there still remains a relatively scant amount of research on the impact that can be had by top management team members on a firm\u27s strategic marketing outcomes. The research which follows explores an important question that has previously been comparatively neglected by researchers: what top management team individual differences can impact the strategic marketing outcomes of the firm? The first essay, based on a multi-industry sample of 325 publicly listed fortune 500 firms over a five-year period (2003-2008), reveals that CEOs who are more extraverted tend to run companies with greater levels of marketing capabilities. This essay explores the alternative perspectives of extraverted leadership and concludes that an extraverted leader, who is more concerned with social interactions, tends to focus on building relationships, rather than the traditional approaches of beating competitors to market and increasing transactions. The second essay explores an interesting perspective borrofrom the field of biology: facial width-to-height ratio. Using recent research from the field of evolution and human behavior as a theoretical foundation, this research looks at physical characteristics as a way for stakeholders to predict the aggressive actions of the firm\u27s top marketing managers. Using this measure of masculinity, this study finds evidence to support the claim that more masculine chief marketing officers will be more aggressive in their strategic-marketing decision making, spending more on advertising and research and development. The third and final essay investigates firms\u27 top management teams as a signal to stakeholders during a diversity crisis. Using negative comments of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella as the empirical context, event-study methodology is implemented in order to examine shareholder value for firms in the technology industry on the day immediately following these inappropriate comments. Results indicate that firms that include an ethnic or gender based minority member as part of their tmt tend to be less impacted by these events than firms that are completely made up of traditional male and Caucasian leaders

Investigating the effect of media synchronicity in professional use of video conferencing applications

Thomas, M. A., Sandhu, R. K., Oliveira, A., & Oliveira, T. (2023). Investigating the effect of media synchronicity in professional use of video conferencing applications. Internet Research. https://doi.org/10.1108/INTR-12-2021-0887---Funding: This work was supported by national funds through FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) under the project - UIDB/04152/2020 - Centro de Investigação em Gestão de Informação (MagIC).Abstract Purpose This research aims to gain a holistic understanding of how video conferencing (VC) apps' media characteristics influence individuals' perceptions of VC apps and, ultimately, their use and continued use in professional settings. Design/methodology/approach A conceptual research model is developed by integrating constructs from media synchronicity theory (MST), social presence theory and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) model, as well as ubiquity, technicality and perceived fees. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to empirically test the conceptual model using data collected from 252 working professionals from the European Union. Findings The results reveal that while performance expectancy (PE) and facilitating conditions (FC) are fundamental to VC app use, these factors alone do not explain the use and continuing use of VC apps in the professional context. Media characteristics that include synchronicity, social presence, and ubiquity are equally crucial to professionals using VC apps. It also confirms the moderating effect of convergence on the relationship between synchronicity and PE and the moderating effect of technicality and perceived fees on the relationship between ubiquity and FC. Originality/value For researchers, the study offers insights into the extent to which technological and socially derived characteristics of VC apps influence the routine tasks undertaken by professionals in virtual work settings. For practitioners, recommendations pivotal to the use of VC apps are presented to promote higher acceptance and improved well-being of the professional workforce.authorsversionepub_ahead_of_prin

Know Your User: Building a Predictive Model of Consumer Preference for Driverless Cars

INTRODUCTION: This dissertation identifies factors significantly predicting participants\u27 preference for riding in an autonomous vehicle rather than flying on a commercial aircraft. A plethora of research has investigated these two transportation industries independently; however, scarcely any research has considered the impact these two industries will have on each other. Travelers’ preference for riding in an autonomous vehicle rather than a commercial aircraft was investigated through four different scenarios. METHOD: A regression equation was created to predict participants’ preferred travel method and validated through a two-stage process. Stage 1 involved the creation of the regression equation, and a total of 1,008 participants responded to an online survey, providing information on demographics, travel-related behavior, and their preference for riding in an autonomous vehicle rather than flying on a commercial aircraft. Stage 2 involved validation of the regression equation, and 1,008 participants responded to the same online survey. Stage 2 participants’ scores were predicted using the regression equation created in Stage 1. Then, their predicted scores and actual scores were compared to validate the equation throughout four different travel scenarios. RESULTS: In Stage 1, a backward stepwise regression assessed the twenty predictive factors (age, gender, ethnicity, social class, price, perceived value, familiarity, fun factor, wariness of new technology, personality (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism), general vehicle affect, general airplane affect, vehicle comfort, vehicle external factors, airplane comfort, and airplane external factors). These factors were tested in four different scenarios, which varied only in the length of time participants would spend traveling. CONCLUSION: A predictive model was created for each scenario, and then all four models were validated in Stage 2 using participants’ predicted scores and actual scores. Models were validated using a t-test, correlation, and comparison of cross-validated R2. The most robust model was for the four-hour trip, with six variables significantly predicting participants’ preferred travel method, which accounted for 50.7% of the variance in the model (50.1% adjusted). Upper Social Class, Vehicle Affect, Airplane Affect, and Vehicle Comfort were the only significant predictors throughout all four scenarios. These four predictors will help other researchers and experts in the vehicle industry identify the first adopters of this new technology. The implications of the results and suggestions for future research are discussed