Survey Says: Strategies for Responding to Challenging Findings

As academic libraries are increasingly called on to demonstrate their value, librarians are beginning to define measures of library impact that work both within and across libraries and constituents. Initiatives such as ACRL\u27s Assessment in Action program have sought to quantify library impact on student success through action research and campus collaboration. But what happens when data collected through an action research project tells you something you don\u27t want to learn? This session will share one university library\u27s experiences with shifting focus from measuring user satisfaction to assessing library impact through a biennial survey of students and faculty. Librarians collaborated with the campus office of institutional research to incorporate student exposure to library instruction and demographic information into the survey data. One finding from the 2016 iteration of the survey was particularly troubling: students who had experienced course-integrated library instruction did not differ in in usage and awareness of library collections and services. Presenters will share how this information was communicated to library and to campus constituents, and how the library responded to this finding. The experience of responding to difficult findings presented an opportunity for administrators to shape the culture of the organization in a healthy way. By celebrating and rewarding experimentation and deep commitment to learning about library users, staff remain encouraged to ask challenging questions about library impact and services. Attendees will take away strategies for identifying student data sources and approaching potential campus partners in order to collaborate on action research projects at their own institution. Attendees will also generate plans for responding to situations where data collection does not represent the library in a positive light

Unpleasant Updates: Discussing Negative Project Performance with Executives

Project managers often have early indications that a project is performing poorly and potentially headed for failure. In such cases, reporting these warnings could prompt executives to provide essential support to mitigate and even prevent problems. However, project managers are frequently reluctant to share such information with executives. This research-in-progress aims to develop a model establishing antecedents that drive accurate status reporting between project managers and executives as well as identifying moderating variables impacting such reporting. The theory of planned behavior and information systems (IS) whistleblowing theory provide the theoretical lenses facilitating the identification of probable antecedents to such reporting intentions. A theoretical model including propositions has been developed

Can Organizational Practices Inadvertently Silence Potential Whistleblowers?

This study examines how employee perceptions of organizational ethics, safety practices, and manager-subordinate relationships might influence employees’ silence in regards to workplace hazards using a sample of 178 workers in the mining, manufacturing, and petrochemical industries. The findings support a model in which employee perceptions of endangerment by their organization and fear of retaliation for whistleblowing mediate the relationship between manager-subordinate relationships and the practice of withholding negative (and sometimes vital) information from organizational management. Results suggest that even with high quality superior/subordinate relationships, employees may still withhold important information due to the overall perception of the current safety climate

Understanding the Nature of Project Escalation: An Exploratory Study from an IS Risk Perspective

Information Systems project failure has retained its preeminent position as one of the most important research streams in the past decades. Many studies attempt to understand what causes project failure as it is known as the first and most important step to effectively manage projects and avoid project failure. One of the most important reasons causing failure cited in IS literature and trade reports is project escalation. The phenomenon of project escalation has generally been examined from traditional perspectives and little is known about the phenomenon from an IS risk viewpoint. A qualitative case study of an IS project in Thailand is then used to illustrate the nature of project escalation and explain the relationships between project escalation and IS risks. The results of this study extend the existing body of knowledge of project escalation and describe the dynamic nature of project escalation from a nontraditional point of view

\u27Unfreezing-Changing-Refreezing\u27 of Actors\u27 Commitment: The Transition from Escalation to De-Escalation of Commitment to Information Technology Projects

Escalation is a common and costly problem among IT projects. Although the potential of de-escalation of commitment to failing courses of action has been much heralded, many such efforts may result in failure due to constituencies biasing facts in the direction of previously accepted beliefs, and therefore, prevent an organization from de-escalating. Here, we adopt Lewin’s change framework to examine the commitment transformation during the transition from escalation to de-escalation of an eprocurement project in a local government organization in UK. Our findings suggest that the entire process of ‘unfreezing-changing-refreezing’ was enacted through the deployment of behaviour disconfirmation, psychological safety creation, and development, alignment and integration of new attitudes and behaviours. The research and practical implications of these findings are explored

Beyond user acceptance: The determinants of the intention to produce user created contents on the internet

The advance in User Created Contents (UCCs) web sites like YouTube changed the role of Internet users from contents receivers to contents creators; a role which requires more pro-active user behaviour. However, the literature on user behaviour in information technology lacks theories that explain the pro-active user behaviour of producing and sharing UCCs with others on the Internet. This paper aims to reveal the major attributes of Internet users that have a positive impact on the intention to produce UCCs on the Internet. Extant related theories are reviewed to extract major factors of Internet users that lead to the production of UCCs. A questionnaire survey is administrated to 400 sampled respondents in South Korea to test the relationships among the identified factors. The results show that playfulness, self-expressiveness/sharing intention, innovativeness, computing skills and reward have a positive impact on the intention to produce UCCs. In particular, innovativeness turned out to have the biggest impact, while social participation is not a significant factor. Mediator variables such as age, gender and types of UCC also turned out to be playing a role in the causal relationships among the factors and the intention to produce UCCs. A model pertaining to the intention to produce UCCs online is developed and tested. The academic and practical implications of the study are also discussed in details

The legitimation-seeking process in information systems development

We investigate the importance of legitimation-seeking in IS development by describing two related projects in the Central Hospital, Bangkok. In the second project, begun immediately after the first, there were major improvements in legitimation-seeking activities and the implemented IS was a success, providing strong evidence that stakeholders perceived a direct link between legitimation failure and project failure. Our results provide insights into legitimation-seeking failure and the multiple legitimation strategies used to achieve pragmatic, moral and cognitive types of legitimacy. We generalize our results to an integrated framework of the legitimation process as well as a preliminary model of IS legitimation-seeking failure involving the mum and deaf effects. We suggest that this framework may be generalized to settings which share similar empirical circumstances