It\u27s Mine. The Role of Psychological Ownership and Territoriality in Knowledge Hiding

Recently, researchers started asking why and how people hide knowledge. One explanation is that people develop feelings of psychological ownership for their knowledge and tend to protect it by engaging in territoriality. Prior research holds that psychological ownership is an important antecedent of knowledge hiding. However, little is known about how people develop these feelings of ownership for knowledge. This research-in-progress derives a theoretical model and proposes that knowledge characteristics are triggers for the development of ownership feelings. The characteristics in the focus of this paper are knowledge complexity and knowledge uniqueness. Moreover, this paper suggests that ownership manifests in two particular territorial intentions (defending and marking), which, in turn, impact hiding behavior. This study is one of the first that focuses on knowledge characteristics to address the development of ownership feelings as the main explanation for knowledge hiding

The dual pathway to information avoidance in information systems use

This article develops an explanatory model of information avoidance behavior from extant theory and examines its hypotheses using psychophysiological methods. It integrates existing but partially conflicting explanations into a coherent positivist model based on Coping Theory. The existence of two distinct but interlinked causal pathways to information avoidance will be outlined. Both pathways are cause by defects in the information quality. The first pathway is grounded on being threatened by the information’s inconsistency. The second pathway is based on being distressed by the information’s complexity. Due to the involvement of cognition as well as affect, the usefulness of traditional measurement methods alone is deemed to be limited. Thus, we will draw upon recent advances from NeuroIS research in order to integrate psychophysiological measures into an extended, triangulated measurement protocol. This article intends to contribute to this special issue in three ways. First, it shapes a theoretical model for studying information avoidance which has received little attention in IS research. Second, it exemplifies the derivation and instantiation of a NeuroIS measurement model and the selection of appropriate NeuroIS methods for scrutinizing the theoretical information avoidance model. Third, based on the evidence of an experiment, it provides guidelines for how to conduct eye-tracking, pupillometry, and facial electromyography measurements as well as how to subsequently derive meaning from the initial data collected

The Impact of Self-Determination on the Information-Stopping Behavior of Professionals: An Exploratory Study in the Software Industry

Online search has become an important part of professional and daily life. With an endless amount of information available, terminating the search when sufficient information is gathered is critical for managing decision-making. So far, research has analyzed cognitive influences: how people process information and how their mental models influence stopping. However, little is known about motivational influences arising from individual desires, preferences, or incentives. In this research-in-progress paper, we consider the role of motivation on stopping behavior. Drawing on self-determination theory, we develop a structure of motivation, propose its influence on stopping behavior, and conduct exploratory case studies on an individual level in the software industry. Our results show that a more self-determined motivation results in a more intensive and longer information search – that is, in later stopping. This finding is the first step toward the development of motivational stopping rules

Personalized tracking of goals and gains after psychotherapy using behavioral data

A multitude of stimuli can trigger anxiety or fear. If anxiety becomes pronounced and begins to impinge on a person's social functioning, psychologists speak of anxiety disorders. Most fears and anxieties are strongly tied to location: for example, fear of bridges, crowded places, or elevators. Even when fear is elicited by specific, animate stimuli such as dogs or spiders, there are often strong ties with certain locations (e.g. the dog park). As a consequence of this marked worry and anxiety, people with phobias often cease to approach these locations – they avoid them. Besides the tremendous deleterious impact on general wellbeing and personal life, the economic consequences of anxiety disorders also impacts society. Exposure therapy is the treatment of choice for anxiety disorders and involves deliberate, systematic confrontation of feared stimuli. Although highly effective, return of fear post-treatment remains a significant problem for many individuals. There is evidence to suggest that fears return due to a lack of regular self-exposure to feared situations. We outline a software tool that allows feared situations to be identified within psychotherapy sessions that can be later used to create dynamic “fear maps”. These maps update as patients systematically confront these locations. In addition, we outline how principles from gamification can be used to depict quantified gains, and performance generally. Our application collects GPS and self-report data collected by mobile phones. Tracking the location of patients allows i) identification of movement patterns and ii) tagging of user's emotional ratings at specific locations. This information helps the users to better quantify and understand the extent of their avoidance behavior, their progress and achievements, and importantly, provides an individualized measure of relapse potential