The effects of ICT use on employee's motivations: an empirical evaluation

Recent studies underline a positive impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and new work practices on firms' productivity. In order to obtain productivity gains, firms need to provide workers with sufficient incentives and to encourage motivations. Our econometric results, obtained with data at the individual level collected in Luxembourg in 2004-2005, indicate that Internet use allows for the creation of an enriching work environment that positively influences pure intrinsic motivations of the workers that share the preferences of their firm (insiders). These pure intrinsic motivations are crowded in when the firm provides positive incentives, and crowded out when the firm resorts to monitoring. Moreover, the results show that the virtualization of contact due to the resort of Internet communication instead of face-to-face communication decreases the development of a team spirit between workers. But the magnitude of this effect is smaller than the magnitude of the positive link of Internet use with workers' need of recognition. Concerning workers who think of themselves not as a part of the firm (outsiders), it appears that offering the access to the Internet to those workers does not influence their motivations.intrinsic motivations, extrinsic motivations, ICT, Internet, identity, incentives

The impact of technological changes on incentives and motivations to work hard

The diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) associated with the diffusion of new work practices since fifteen years has raised concerns about the impact of these changes on productivity. Some recent studies underline a positive impact of ICT and of new work practices on firms' productivity. But as well known in the principal-agent literature agents are predisposed to shirking, so, in order to obtain productivity gains firms need to provide workers with sufficient incentives and to encourage motivations. Our main results, obtained with data collected in Luxembourg in 2004-2005, indicate that ICT permit to create a team spirit and an enriching work environment that influences positively pure intrinsic motivations of workers. These motivations, associated with positive incentives, can be substitutes for the direct monitoring introduced usually to obtain the effort of employees, but hard to be used in a context of increasing autonomy.Technologies ; Incentives ; Motivations

Understanding the implementation of e-business strategies: Evidence from Luxembourg

Our empirical study aims at identifying the drivers of the implementation of an e-business strategy by firms located in Luxembourg. The setting up of such a strategy is apprehended through the website and the type of strategy through the functionalities available on the Internet. Thus we distinguish an information-oriented strategy from a commercially oriented one. Probit analyses and models derived from count data models are conducted on a dataset of website investments by about 1100 firms located in Luxembourg. Our results show that the sale of online fashionable products like tourism, the ownership of a well-known brand and the follow-up of rivals' behaviours are highly significant determinants of the adoption and development of an e-business strategy. Financial, human and technological resources seem to favour the adoption of such a strategy but have no significant influence on the choice of the strategy pursued. Moreover the use of technologies that make the business process more flexible, public actions that diffuse best practices concerning technologies adoption and being the leader on the market are specific drivers of the deployment of an e-business strategy. Finally, an intense perceived competition negatively influences the decision to invest heavily in e-commerce.e-business strategies; website adoption and investment; right truncated Poisson regression

Compensating for processing difficulty in discourse:Effect of parallelism in contrastive relations

This study aims to establish whether the processing of different connectives (e.g., and, but) and different coherence relations (addition, contrast) can be modulated by a structural feature of the connected segments—namely, parallelism. While but is mainly used to contrast two expressions, and occurs in many different relations and has been shown to come with a processing cost. We report three self-paced reading experiments in which we manipulate whether the connected segments share a common verb phrase. Such parallel constructions frequently occur in contrastive relations, although they are typically treated as additive in comprehension research. We expect that parallelism will compensate for the cognitive complexity of contrast and for the ambiguity of and by further signaling the coherence relation. Our results indicate that parallelism speeds up processing and provides further evidence for priming in comprehension. However, parallelism interacted with connective ambiguity in an overt disambiguation task (Experiment 3) but not in a more natural reading task (Experiment 2). We argue that the processing of contrast remains shallow unless disambiguation is explicitly required

The complementarities between Infomation and Communication Technologies Use, New Organizational Practices and Employee's Contextual Performance: Evidence from Europe in 2005 and 2010

International audienceThis article investigates the relationship between Information Technologies (IT), new organizational practices and workers' contextual performance in the European context. Our empirical results are based on data about more than 11000 employees from 16 European countries in 2005 and more than 16000 in 2010. First, we find asymmetric effects of IT use. Internet use is, indeed, positively related to all aspects of contextual performance in 2010, while computer use has been positively associated with contextual performance in 2005 but not in 2010. Second, we find that most of the considered new organizational practices have a positive relationship with employees' contextual performance.Cet article analyse les relations entre les Technologies de l'Information (TI), les nouvelles pratiques organisationnelles et la performance contextuelle des employés dans le contexte européen. Nos résultats empiriques sont basés sur des bases de données concernant plus de 11 000 employés de 16 pays européens en 2005 et plus de 16 000 en 2010. Premièrement, nos résultats soulignent des effets asymétriques de l'usage des TI. L'usage d'Internet est, en effet, positivement lié à tous les aspects de la performance contextuelle en 2010, tandis que l'usage de l'informatique est associé positivement seulement à la performance contextuelle interpersonnelle en 2005. Deuxièmement, nous constatons que la plupart des nouvelles pratiques organisationnelles considérées ont une relation positive avec la performance contextuelle des employés

Understanding the implementation of e-business strategies: Evidence from Luxembourg

Our empirical study aims at identifying the drivers of the implementation of an e-business strategy by firms located in Luxembourg. The setting up of such a strategy is apprehended through the website and the type of strategy through the functionalities available on the Internet. Thus we distinguish an information-oriented strategy from a commercially oriented one. Probit analyses and models derived from count data models are conducted on a dataset of website investments by about 1100 firms located in Luxembourg. Our results show that the sale of online fashionable products like tourism, the ownership of a well-known brand and the follow-up of rivals' behaviours are highly significant determinants of the adoption and development of an e-business strategy. Financial, human and technological resources seem to favour the adoption of such a strategy but have no significant influence on the choice of the strategy pursued. Moreover the use of technologies that make the business process more flexible, public actions that diffuse best practices concerning technologies adoption and being the leader on the market are specific drivers of the deployment of an e-business strategy. Finally, an intense perceived competition negatively influences the decision to invest heavily in e-commerce

Understanding the implementation of e-business strategies: Evidence from Luxembourg

Our empirical study aims at identifying the drivers of the implementation of an e-business strategy by firms located in Luxembourg. The setting up of such a strategy is apprehended through the website and the type of strategy through the functionalities available on the Internet. Thus we distinguish an information-oriented strategy from a commercially oriented one. Probit analyses and models derived from count data models are conducted on a dataset of website investments by about 1100 firms located in Luxembourg. Our results show that the sale of online fashionable products like tourism, the ownership of a well-known brand and the follow-up of rivals' behaviours are highly significant determinants of the adoption and development of an e-business strategy. Financial, human and technological resources seem to favour the adoption of such a strategy but have no significant influence on the choice of the strategy pursued. Moreover the use of technologies that make the business process more flexible, public actions that diffuse best practices concerning technologies adoption and being the leader on the market are specific drivers of the deployment of an e-business strategy. Finally, an intense perceived competition negatively influences the decision to invest heavily in e-commerce

Feedback quality and divided attention:Exploring commentaries on alignment in task-oriented dialogue

While studies have shown the importance of listener feedback in dialogue, we still know little about the factors that impact its quality. Feedback can indicate either that the addressee is aligning with the speaker (i.e. ‘positive’ feedback) or that there is some communicative trouble (i.e. ‘negative’ feedback). This study provides an in-depth account of listener feedback in task-oriented dialogue (a director–matcher game), where positive and negative feedback is produced, thus expressing both alignment and misalignment. By manipulating the listener’s cognitive load through a secondary mental task, we measure the effect of divided attention on the quantity and quality of feedback. Our quantitative analysis shows that performance and feedback quantity remain stable across cognitive load conditions, but that the timing and novelty of feedback vary: turns are produced after longer pauses when attention is divided between two speech-focused tasks, and they are more economical (i.e. include more other-repetitions) when unrelated words need to be retained in memory. These findings confirm that cognitive load impacts the quality of listener feedback. Finally, we found that positive feedback is more often generic and shorter than negative feedback and that its proportion increases over time

On the Merit of Equal Pay: When Influence Activities Interact with Incentive Setting

Influence costs models predict that organizations should limit managerial discretion to deter organizational members from engaging in wasteful politicking activities. We test this conjecture in a controlled, yet realistic, work environment in which we allow employees to influence managers’ decisions about rewards. We find that influence activities are pervasive and significantly lower organizational performance. Organizational performance suffers because principals offer weaker incentives when influence activities are allowed than when they are not. Importantly, we show that equal pay incentive schemes perform better when influence activities are available than when they are not. Our results thus support the idea that prevalent politicking activities may account for the widespread use of bureaucratic, and apparently inefficient, compensation rules in organizations

Neurological manifestations of post-acute sequelae of COVID-19: which liquid biomarker should we use?

Long COVID syndrome, also known as post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC), is characterized by persistent symptoms lasting 3–12 weeks post SARS-CoV-2 infection. Patients suffering from PASC can display a myriad of symptoms that greatly diminish quality of life, the most frequent being neuropsychiatric. Thus, there is an eminent need to diagnose and treat PASC related neuropsychiatric manifestation (neuro-PASC). Evidence suggests that liquid biomarkers could potentially be used in the diagnosis and monitoring of patients. Undoubtedly, such biomarkers would greatly benefit clinicians in the management of patients; however, it remains unclear if these can be reliably used in this context. In this mini review, we highlight promising liquid (blood and cerebrospinal fluid) biomarkers, namely, neuronal injury biomarkers NfL, GFAP, and tau proteins as well as neuroinflammatory biomarkers IL-6, IL-10, TNF-α, and CPR associated with neuro-PASC and discuss their limitations in clinical applicability