Job Selection Preferences Of Business Students

To assess the job selection preferences of business students, two hundred forty one undergraduate and MBA students participated in a survey evaluating the importance of 20 job attributes. Overall, the students rated growth potential, benefits package, job responsibility and variety as the most important attributes when pursuing an employment opportunity.  The results indicate that graduate business students are more concerned with work culture, flexibility and ease of commute and less concerned with company recognition compared to undergraduates.  The findings also show that work culture seems to be especially relevant to female MBA students, while geographical location seems to be least relevant to male MBA students.  Our results suggest that, to be effective with their recruitment efforts, employers and placement professionals must take into account both key desirable job attributes and the unique needs of their targeted business student sub-populations.&nbsp

A Comparison Of Evaluation Techniques For Decision Analysis Involving Large Attribute Sets

This study investigates the effectiveness of two multi-attribute evaluation techniques under conditions of high information load that is caused by large attribute sets.  One hundred and sixty-five respondents were randomly assigned to two groups: the first one used a holistic, point allocation-based method to evaluate a list of 20 job attributes, while the second employed a triad-based technique that decomposed the evaluation task. The results suggest that the decomposed method produced more reliable results and was deemed easier to use, even though it took longer to complete the task

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 Dynamics of IT Project Status Reporting: A Self-Reinforcing Cycle of Distrust

Accurate project status reporting is important to avoid the problem of information technology (IT) project escalation and to successfully manage and deliver IT projects. One approach that some organizations have taken is to audit their IT projects to avoid surprises that are frequently associated with inaccurate status reporting. Little is known, however, about the effects that such auditing arrangements can have on the dynamics of project status reporting. To examine the process of IT project status reporting in this context, we followed a grounded theory inspired approach in which we investigated nine IT projects in one U.S. state’s government agencies. All of the projects we studied were subject to the state’s IT oversight board. Based on 118 interviews with a variety of stakeholders including technical personnel, managers, users, and contractors, we present a grounded theory of project status reporting dynamics in which the reporting process can best be characterized as a self-reinforcing cycle of distrust between the project team and the auditors. Specifically, in some projects, we observed a pattern whereby project teams interpreted the auditor’s scrutiny as unfair and as not adding value to their projects. As a result, they responded by embracing some defensive reporting tactics. The auditors interpreted the project team’s actions as indicating either deception or incompetence, and they then increased their scrutiny of the reports, thus exacerbating the situation and further fuelling the cycle of distrust. We discuss implications for both theory and practice

Managing MIS project failures : a crisis management perspective

This study describes a conceptual framework that portrays information system project failures as organizational crises. The main assumption of this study is that such failures will invariably happen and thus there is a need to make them less costly and more beneficial to organizations. To identify the behaviors and factors that influence an organization's ability to effectively manage a project failure, this dissertation reviews the crisis management literature. Based on this review, a three-stage model is formulated. To understand the mechanisms underlying this model, a number of hypotheses (which are informed by a number of related organizational behavior areas) are generated. These hypotheses focus on three key crisis management factors: the organization's ability to promptly detect an impeding failure, its capacity to manage the failure's impacts, and its propensity to learn from it. To empirically assess the validity of the conceptual model, three case studies of Canadian public organizations were conducted. The empirical findings provide strong support to the model's conjectures and indicate that project failures generate several crisis-related behaviors and responses. More specifically, the findings suggest that an organization's proactive preparation for a failure can have a significant moderating effect on its impact. However, the findings clearly show that an organization's ability to promptly detect (and prepare for) a failure is impeded by behaviors that are motivated by escalation of commitment. Such behaviors lead to a prolonged pre-crisis denial period and have a suppressing effect on whistle-blowing, which is pursued as a denial-curtailing strategy by non-management participants. The empirical findings describe both operational and legitimacy tactics used by organizations to cope with the aftermath of a project failure and indicate that credibility restoration is a significant concern during large crises. Finally, the empirical evidence indicates that organizational learning and adaptation are more likely to follow major project failures than less significant ones. This contradicts threat-rigidity arguments and provides support to the failure-induced learning theory.Business, Sauder School ofGraduat

Biased project status reports: A survey of IS professionals

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

Selective Status Reporting in Information Systems Projects: A Dyadic-Level Investigation

This study investigates selective reporting behaviors that are pursued by project managers when communicating the status of their information system initiatives to their executives. To understand the types, motivations, impacts, and antecedents of such behaviors, a message-exchange perspective is adopted and the prior literature on IS project status reporting is reviewed. This study incorporates an empirical investigation that examined the influence of five dyadic factors on selective reporting using a survey of 561 project managers. The findings of the study reveal a positive effect of reporting quality on project performance and indicate that a specific type of selective reporting behavior (optimistic biasing) has a degrading effect on reporting quality. Moreover, the findings show that all five antecedents have a significant influence on the propensity of project managers to report selectively. Specifically, the project executive’s power, the project manager’s trust in the executive, and the executive’s quality of communication impact selective reporting directly; the executive’s familiarity with the IS development process and the executive’s organizational affiliation vis-à-vis that of the project manager have an indirect influence (it is mediated through other factors). The effects of each of these factors on the two types of selective reporting (optimistic and pessimistic biasing) are examined, and the implications of these findings for both researchers and managers are discussed in this article

Determining attribute weights using mathematical programming

Group decisions are an important element of successful knowledge management in organizations. Such decisions are difficult to make, however, especially when they involve a large set of attributes that require decision-makers to develop rankings. This paper presents a goal programming model for determining constrained regression estimates of attribute weights. The model is developed using pair-wise comparison ratings that are derived by using triads of the attributes. In addition, metrics are presented for measuring individual and group consensus. A specific application to the health care industry is presented to illustrate results that are obtained from the model.Goal programming Integer programming Decision making Attribute prioritization Quantitative techniques/methodology