Investigating Organizational Self-control: A Willpower Perspective

Behavioral control theory attempts to explain how controllers can ensure controlees work towards controller goals. Prior studies underinvestigate organizational self-control, and produces mixed results. This paper theorizes and elaborates on the construct of organizational self-control, and how controllers can encourage controlees’ organizational self-control. Organizational self-control differs from “personal” self-control in that organizational self-control focuses on getting another individual (e.g., employee) to exert self-control to perform a controller’s task. Consonant with the personal self-control literature, we argue organizational self-control comprises (self) goals, (self) monitoring, and willpower. We further argue organizational self-control is a mediator between external controls (formal and clan control) and controlee performance. While the literature considers external controls’ influence on one’s goal and self-monitoring, it does not consider external controls’ impact on willpower. We demonstrate through a case study in product development that how control is enacted can impact willpower positively, leading to positive control outcomes

How can live streamers enhance viewer engagement in eCommerce streaming?

eCommerce live streaming has enabled new forms of customer engagement, where live streamers, viewers and platform owners engage each other in real time to hawk and trade goods and services. Central to live streaming sales are live streamers. It is therefore critical to discover techniques to maximize live streamers’ engagement with viewers. Based on the intimacy theory, we propose the perceived intimacy live streamers created improves online engagement with viewers. Our survey results suggest streamers’ authenticity, attitudinal similarity and customer response capability enhance intimacy perceived by online viewers, leading to viewers\u27 online engagement. Contributions of our study are discussed

Obtaining Top Management Support in IT Projects: A Case Study

Research has argued that one reason for IT project failure is the lack of top management support. However, obtaining top management support is often considered outside the IT project team’s locus of control. Our research demonstrates that top management support can be obtained through continuous engagement. Also, a failure to engage can decrease top management support. We reveal an engagement strategy that starts with small favor requests followed by increasingly onerous favors rewarded by small concessions. This is demonstrated through a case study of the support of three division heads and their corresponding divisions in the implementation of an enterprise system. In case 1, an indifferent division head withdrew support after a lack of IT engagement. In case 2, a hostile division head became an advocate of the system after continuous IT engagement. Finally, in case 3, a supportive division head became more supportive as a result of continuous engagement by IT

Size does Matter: How do Micro-influencers Impact Follower Purchase Intention on Social Media?

Social media influencers have become a significant source of information for customers and a prevalent marketing tool for brands. It is crucial to explore factors that affect the follower’s purchase intention of the products endorsed by social media influencers. Recently, micro-influencers have gained recognition for their authenticity and relatability when compared with their established counterparts, such as macro- or mega-influencers. Increasing organizations also see the value micro-influencers can bring to their brands via more interaction with their target customers. Based on the parasocial interaction theory, we propose that the perceived credibility and transparency of micro-influencers enhance followers’ purchase intention through the mediation of parasocial interaction. Parasocial interaction is a kind of psychological relationship in which followers consider influencers as their friends, regardless of their limited interactions with those influencers. Our findings indicate that parasocial interaction between micro-influencers and their followers positively impacts purchase intentions of recommended products. It is also found that perceived micro-influencer credibility and transparency positively affect followers’ parasocial interaction with microinfluencers. Implications of our findings are discussed

Driving marketing agility in the digital age

Facing rapidly changing markets, firms need to develop marketing agility to respond to the markets. However, marketing agility involves marketing decisions that often rely on the marketing department, rather than top management, to initiate and execute. Thus, this study, based on the theory of organizational alignment and resource orchestration theory, proposes that firms need to facilitate the alignment between marketing and non-marketing departments (i.e., marketing-operations alignment) by developing marketing resource orchestration capability. Further, we argue IT collaboration capability (i.e., inter-department collaboration tools and applications) and advanced analytics capability (i.e., analytics tools with machine learning algorithms) can help firms to enable marketing-operations alignment and marketing resource orchestration capability respectively. Based on a sample of 155 Taiwanese service firms, a model with five hypotheses is empirically tested using the PLS analysis. Our preliminary results support our arguments

WHEN DOES FORMAL CONTROL FAIL? AN EXPERIMENT

There are mixed findings on whether formal control will or will not improve performance. To address this paradox, we propose that types of formal control (enabling vs. coercive) influence performance separately because of the different costs they impose on the controlee. We conducted an experiment, and obtained unexpected, but interesting results: the controlee performs best for simple tasks in the no formal control condition, because costs of the control override its benefits. Our preliminary results suggest that there might be an interaction between types of formal control and degrees of task complexity. A difficult version of the same experimental task will be employed in our next experiment to test the interaction effect

Obtaining Management Support for IT Projects: A Persuasion View

While it is widely agreed that obtaining top management support is critical for the success of IT projects, little research has provided prescriptive implications for how such support can be obtained. Much of the prescriptive literature has argued for cognition-based approaches, where managers are persuaded to participate in an IT project using logical arguments and factual evidence. We apply a persuasion view to investigate how management can be persuaded to participate in an IT project. Through a survey, we demonstrate the importance of not only cognition, but affect; one can influence top management’s emotions to support an IT project. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of two persuasion behaviors by the project team on management attitude and participation. Both persuasion behaviors induce management participation by increasing management’s cognitive and emotional involvement in the project, albeit with emotion being a stronger predictor of management participation. Some important implications for theory and practice are discussed

MANAGING KNOWLEDGE HOLES IN LARGE IS PROJECTS

Substantial research has demonstrated the importance of bridging structural holes across functional groups in IT projects. We argue that bridging structural holes is necessary but insufficient for ensuring project success. An additional requirement is that knowledge holes across functional groups need to be bridged to enable effective coordination across functional groups. We propose and empirically study the concept of knowledge holes in a case study of an ERP upgrade. Our preliminary findings suggest that complementary to the concept of structural holes, the concept of knowledge holes is useful for explaining different project outcomes

Passive leadership and online interaction: The mediating effects of job autonomy and employee resilience

With the prevalence of the Internet and mobile devices, news organizations must adapt themselves to the trend of digitalization. Social media engagement editors emerge as a new role crucial for the survival of news organizations. Engagement editors are tasked to internally facilitate the functions of marketing, content production, and data analysis. They also assume the role of “boundary spanner” for a news organization, managing online community and dealing with online audiences and their frequent toxic and aggressive behaviors. That is, engagement editors are easier than other workers to be affected by emotional stress, and thus reduce job performance. According to conservation of resource theory (COR), leadership and job autonomy both have impacts on personal resources. This research attempts to investigate whether a particular style of leadership (i.e., passive leadership) would negatively affect the engagement editors’ performance (i.e., interaction with online fans). Furthermore, how the negativity would be amelioratedby job autonomy and employee resilience. The management of engagement editors has not yet been a focus of academic studies; researchers rarely approach engagement editors from the perspective of COR. This study attempts to remedy these theoretical and practical shortcomings. We surveyed 200 news media engagement editors and used the smart PLS 3 to analyze the data. This research provides useful implication for the management of engagement editors