The Effects of Individuals\u27 Cognitive Styles and Warning Types on Anchoring Effects

Individuals’ decision-making behavior cannot be completely rational, which is partly due to cognitive biases. Decision-makers unconsciously introduce biases in their cognitive process, thus affecting decision-making. The causes and effects of cognitive biases have been extensively discussed in the field of psychology. With the advancements in information technology and emergence of new information systems, an increasing amount of information is being obtained through information systems, and decisions are being made by either relying on or with the assistance of these systems. Whether information systems will aggravate cognitive biases in the process of decision-making, or will assist decision-makers in avoiding or reducing the effects of cognitive biases, is currently the focus of attention. George et al. (2000) tried to use a decision support system to generate warnings to prompt users to be aware of anchoring effects and adjust for biases; however, with the design of a single warning mode at that time, the debiasing effect was highly limited, suggesting that personalized suggestions or warnings could be provided subsequently. On the other hand, Frederick (2005) developed the “Cognitive Reflection Test” (CRT) with only three questions. Based on a solid theoretical foundation and a great amount of verification results, CRT can easily and accurately measure cognitive ability. Empirical findings reveal that CRT is correlated with time preference and risk preference: that is, people with high CRT scores are more cautious and tend to have risk preference and risk propensity. On the contrary, people with low CRT scores are more inclined to quick-thinking, dislike risks, and are less adventurous. This creates an opportunity for personalized warnings. We can quickly distinguish the cognitive styles of decision-makers and understand their risk preference through CRT, and then provide corresponding warning messages, thereby improving the debiasing effect of warnings and reducing the cognitive biases of decision-makers. This study intends to identify decision-makers with different cognitive styles through CRT, investigate the influences of anchoring effects on decision-makers with different cognitive styles as well as the moderating effect of warning modes on anchoring effects, and try to identify the fit of decision-makers’ cognitive styles and warning modes to eliminate anchoring effects. Valuation is chosen as the scenario. It is hoped that the findings of this study can provide some reference for the design of decision support systems in the future. The main purpose of this study is to investigate how different reference anchor point settings affect decision-makers in the evaluation process. The independent variables include reference anchor points: high/low, cognitive styles: quick-thinking (CRT low)/deliberative (CRT high), warning types: no/response guidance/threat assessment; the dependent variables are decision outputs including anchoring effects, decision adjustment, and decision confidence. We use a simple and effective CRT to quickly distinguish the cognitive styles of decision-makers, design different types of warning messages in decision support systems to prompt decision-makers, and reduce the impacts of anchoring effects, which has high research value and can contribute to the fields of decision support systems and information management. This research will be conducted by field experiments

Managers\u27 Perceived Benefits of Using Electronic Procurement in Taiwan

Facing the competitive pressure from new hospitals and new regulations from the Bureau of National Health Insurance, hospital managers in Taiwan are concentrating on reducing the hospital operation costs and improving the healthcare quality. Practitioners and academic researchers agree that reducing the pharmacy cost is one of the best solutions to sustain competitive advantage. As electronic commerce becomes popular in many industry sectors, e- procurement is growing rapidly in the healthcare industry. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the managers\u27 perceptions of benefits of using electronic procurement system. After surveying 152 hospitals in Taiwan, we find that hospital size and adoption status have significant influence on many perceived benefits. Managers in large hospitals show stronger confidence in the perceived benefits of using e-procurement than their counterparts of small hospitals

Leadership, Regulatory Focus and Project Performance

Leadership is one critical factor of effective teamwork, such as information system (IS) projects. The mission of project leaders is to motivate followers and create an effective working environment that allows project teams to effectively meet the predefined goals. However, based on regulatory focus theory, a team may strive to the optional situation (promotion focus) or try to avoid not meeting the minimum requirements (prevention). The aim of this paper is to explore the effect of leadership styles (transformational and transactional) on the regulatory focus of one team (promotion and prevention), and investigate the relationship between regulatory focus and project team performance. Based on data collected from 154 IS professionals, we found that transformational leadership is associated with promotion focus and transactional leadership leads to prevention focus. Furthermore, while promotion focus orientated teams can perform effectively, prevention focus oriented teams are less efficient. Implications toward academia and practitioners are provided

An Evaluation of Publication Productivity in Information Systems: 1999 to 2003

University hiring, promotion and tenure decisions make researchers\u27 publication productivity an important issue. This study reports on data about publication productivity of information systems (IS) researchers from 1999 to 2003. We collected information about IS papers published in twelve IS journals during this period. After classification, the most productive individuals and institutions for this sample are identified. We also compared our findings with past research to demonstrate the changes in publication productivity over time. Publication productivity changes somewhat among researchers and institutions

When does One Weight Threats more? An Integration of Regulatory Focus Theory and Protection Motivation Theory

Protection motivation theory has been adopted to understand the driver of information security behaviors broadly. Based on theoretical arguments and empirical results, security behaviors are driven by individuals’ appraisal toward threats and coping. However, while most study focus on the impacts of independent variables on dependent variables, previous studies largely ignore a fact that, under certain conditions, individuals tend to weight the importance of threat (or coping) appraisal more. Given that the goal of security behavior is to protection information and individuals may be oriented to the goal differently, we argue that the magnitude of the impacts of threat and coping appraisal may be contingent on individuals’ goal orientation. Specifically, this study attempts to integrate protection motivation theory with regulatory focus theory and explore whether (1) threat appraisal is more critical when prevention focus in high and (2) coping appraisal generates more impact when promotion focus is high. By integrating protection motivation theory with regulatory focus theory and revealing the moderating roles of regulatory focus on protection motivations, we expect to contribute to protection motivation theory by showing the effects of threat and coping appraisal may be contingent on certain conditions

The Influence of Information Security Stress on Security Policy Compliance: A Protection Motivation Theory Perspective

The occurrence of security incidents will not only cause substantial loss to the enterprise but also serious damage to goodwill. An enterprise has to formulate and implement effective security policies to reduce the occurrence of security incidents. However, the process of promoting the security policy will put stress on employees. The focus of this paper is whether these pressures will affect staff\u27s compliance with the security policies based on the protection motivation theory. This study uses a survey method and 324 responses are collected. The results show that security task stress and security job stress have a significant impact on the formation of security role stress. Security role stress impacts threat and coping appraisals leading to security compliance

Dealing with Security Related Stress: Mindfulness on Countermeasures

Contemporary knowledge workers face information security-related stress and often struggle with responding to security threats. Employees deal with stress using different coping strategies. Some adopt avoidance coping mode to dissociate themselves with stress while some adopt approach coping mode to actively solve problems. We propose that being mindful on countermeasures of information security threats can ease stress and the negative impacts caused by stress. In addition, we also hypothesize the moderating effect of mindfulness on the relationships between security-related stress and two coping modes

IT AMBIDEXTERITY – CONCEPTUALIZATION AT THE BUSINESS PROCESS LEVEL

In todays digitized and globalized economy, companies face increasing competitive pressures and un-precedented speed of change in business conditions. Considering limited IT budgets, process owners and IT departments need to decide how to divide their spending on efficiency-enhancing and flexibil-ity-enhancing IT capabilities to optimally support their business processes. Turning from thinking of efficiency and flexibility as trade-off towards ambidexterity puts focus on simultaneously pursuing ef-ficiency through exploitative and flexibility through explorative business process IT (BPIT) capabili-ties. While these capabilities have been analysed in combination at the organizational level and inde-pendently at the business process-level, there is scarce research on the combined effects of those activ-ities for a particular business process. This research paper presents conceptualization and operation-alization of ambidextrous IT capabilities at the business process level. In addition, further concepts that are relevant for analysis of BPIT ambidexterity, such as business process performance, opera-tional ambidexterity and business process uncertainty are adapted to the process level. Thus, we in-tend to contribute to the area of business process management (BPM) and research on ambidexterity in IS through the expansion of existing work by providing constructs and scales for further research on these phenomena at the business process level

Leadership and Learning in Information System Development Project Team

In addition to traditional vertical leadership, the importance of shared leadership in teams has been highlighted recently. However, despite the growing interest in team leadership, researchers pay limited attention to the relationship between specific leadership styles and learning types in teams. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a theoretical model to answer the question: “How vertical and shared team leadership styles affect exploration and exploitation of team learning?” In addition to argue the impact of leadership on both types of learning, we further hypothesize a contingency relationship between learning types and leadership styles

Antecedents and Consequences of User Co-Production in Information System Development Projects

A significant number of information system development (ISD) projects fail to achieve their predefined goals on time and/or within budget. Many organizations recognize that users can engage in projects to minimize the difficulties in effectively controlling the project and maximize the value created; therefore, user co-production is a crucial for organizations to enhance the effectiveness of ISD project. This study attempts to understand the antecedents and consequences of user co-production in ISD project. As a key contribution, we posit that user co-production is influenced by social capitals between users and developers. We then postulate that user co-production determines the project outcomes, which are shaped by system quality, user satisfaction and project performance. Data were gathered from a questionnaire survey of 103 pairs of user representatives and developers. Our results show that project outcomes are significantly influenced by user co-production. Furthermore, social capitals between user representatives and developers have positively significant influence on user co-production