Reconciling the Debate on People Analytics in Academia and Practice

People analytics depicts the algorithmization of human resources management characterized by the data-driven automation and support of people-related processes or tasks. On the one hand, people analytics promises productivity increases through optimizing workforce planning, hiring, or talent development. On the other hand, the extensive data collection and analysis of employees’ behaviors can be perceived as invasive, raising privacy concerns. This debate cannot only be explained by diverging norms and values, for example, practitioners realizing commercial opportunities while being criticized by academic commentaries. Instead, an alternative explanation suggests that the opposing views can be reconciled by diving into the conceptual differences regarding what analytical methods and data sources people analytics entails. Hence, this paper proposes the conceptions of operational and strategic people analytics based on a literature review of academics’ and practitioners’ literature. Four propositions about these conceptions’ privacy and performance implications are derived. Future research should empirically validate these propositions

Media Choice in the Digital Era: A Replication Study Using Digital Traces

In recent years, the use of communication and collaboration media tools has increased manifold due to a rise in spatially distributed work. Which media tools individuals choose for their communication activities has been a research question of lasting interest. Established research focused on traditional media, for example, face-to-face, phone, or email. Moving the focus from traditional media towards digital tools requires rethinking previous findings. It is unclear whether the factors influencing digital tools’ choice changed or stayed the same. This paper replicates if the traditional hypothesized relationships and constructs of media choice still hold in the digital era. In response to a surge in interest, digital traces—activity logs from routine technology use—are analyzed for conceptual replication. The conceptual replication revises the boundary conditions of established media choice theory and shows that the supervisor remains a positive influence, whereas physical location becomes negligible, and the coworkers’ influence is inconclusive

Identifying Temporal Rhythms using Email Traces

In the past, work was governed by the natural rhythms of the physical world, but organizations increasingly distribute their work along the temporal dimension. This leads to varying temporal rhythms, which depict recurring patterns of activity in time, among workers, enabled by communication and collaboration technologies. The routine use of technology generates activity log data called digital traces, which promise an opportunity for a data-driven inquiry into temporal rhythms. While research using digital traces is scarce, various vendors claim to identify daily working hours based on email traces. Our study explores the use of email traces for an inquiry into daily and weekly temporal rhythms by triangulating quantitative results with interviews. Contrary to the vendors’ claims, our results show that the usefulness of email traces is limited to identifying aggregated and stable temporal rhythms

Investigating Personalized Price Discrimination of Textile-, Electronics- and General Stores in German Online Retail

Developers of pricing strategies in e-commerce businesses see a wide range of opportunities for deploying online price discrimination techniques given their ability to track consumers’ online identity and behavior. In theory, an increasing use of personal data enables organizations to show every single consumer their own personalized price, which is determined by the consumer’s characteristics, e.g. age, gender, surfing history, or location. This paper aims to explore the existence of online price discrimination activities within the German ecommerce market using a three-method approach. First, inquiring the online retailers via email and investigating their public documents; second, surveying students; and third, using a software crawler to simulate surfing activity. Our results do not provide any evidence of individualized price discrimination, which, we argue, is due to economic and political reasons, not technical reasons

Digital Transformation in Automotive: Drivers of Effective Sales Behaviors During Servitization at a German Car Manufacturer

Manufacturers deem servitization a competitive remedy, facing heightened customer expectations and competition amidst their digital transformation. Servitization refers to a shift from offering products to offering digital product-service systems. Although previous research inquired about traditional service operations, research into the servitization’s digital nature remains nascent and insights addressing the behavioral changes associated with such transformations are lacking. This paper presents an ongoing case study at a German car manufacturer, sharing insights into which organizational and individual factors drive salespeople’s behaviors during servitization based on twelve interviews and eleven workshops. The analysis suggests that usage clarity is key to mediating behaviors. Organizational factors driving behaviors include information dissemination, service orientation, and formalization. Individual factors driving behaviors include technology affinity and involvement. The paper contributes to understanding salespeople’s behavioral changes during introduction of digital product-service systems. Recommendations on designing personnel training programs to improve the marketing of digital product-service systems are derived