Teleworking in the Covid-19 Pandemic

Teleworkers who live and work in the same space are vulnerable to conflicts between personal life and work (LWC). The Covid-19 lockdowns increased the intensity and risk of LWC and changed telework conditions, confronting teleworkers with difficult personal situations and often ill-equipped telework environments. To develop a better understanding of the effects of different LWC dimensions (e.g., time, strain, behavior) on work exhaustion, job satisfaction, routine and innovative job performance and the role of the IT telework environment among teleworkers in the Covid-19 pandemic, a research model based on a sample of 249 teleworkers was developed and validated. The findings show that LWC has adverse effects on job outcomes and that the IT telework environment moderates these effects. The study contributes to the telework and role conflict literature by revealing the essential role of the IT telework environment and by differentiating between routine and innovative job performance among teleworkers

What Is Process Standardization?

Standards and standardization have played an important role in the evolution of information and communication technology. In parts of the literature on standardization and especially among practitioners we see a new theme emerge: business process standards. While there seems to be a consensus on the desirability of process standards, the concept has not yet been fully developed, and there is even less of a clear definition let alone a systematic understanding of the how and why of its value impact than with data and communication standards. In this paper, we suggest a process standardization construct and the associated value dimensions and report on a process standardization effort in a large multinational services firm that reveals how the theoretical considerations translate into concrete business value

How do Users Cope with Technostress over Time? A Longitudinal Study Investigating the Intra-individual Effects of Technostress Mitigation

Users of Information Technology (IT) perceive the challenge of IT-related stress, called technostress. To mitigate the challenge of technostress, users aim to cope by performing behavioral, cognitional, and perceptual efforts. However, past research about coping and technostress neglects the temporal nature of the effect of technostress and coping already discussed in the psychological literature. Even though coping theory was initially construed as being dynamic and transactional in nature, most models of coping in the technostress context have been unidirectional and have treated coping as a static outcome. The following example demonstrates the temporal relationship between technostress and coping — users who suffered from technostress in the past, cope with it currently in order to reduce it in the future. Consequently, IS research has only little understanding of the changing of technostress and the mitigation effect of coping over time. Therefore, the present research-in-progress paper aims to investigate the effect of coping on technostress over time. It thereby follows recent research calls (e.g., Pirkkalainen et al. 2019; Stich et al. 2019), all calling for an investigation of technostress and coping over time using a longitudinal research design. The research-in-progress paper draws on a Latent Growth Modeling (LGM) approach to investigate the trajectory of coping as well as technostress with being able to reveal their changing relationship over time. The results will give insight into the change over time of technostress and coping within individuals

The Impact of IT on Competitive Advantage

How can an organization establish an efficient IS resource? Over the years, the resource-based view (RBV) has provided important insights into the value creation by IT. Unfortunately, large parts of the literature suffer from broad and ambiguous constructs that are problematic to validate and difficult to concretely apply. Furthermore, the transmission from IT resources on one side to competitive advantage on the other is not yet sufficiently understood. Goal of this paper is to clarify some of the often used constructs and build a framework for the transmission from the endowment with resources to the achievement of competitive advantage. In this paper, we aim to contribute to this research strand in two ways. First, a model incorporating many isolated findings from the RBV is developed. Reflecting the need for a process view as proposed by large parts of the alignment and strategic management literature, this is integrated into a single process framework of analysis. Second, by augmenting a microeconomic production function incorporating organizational routines the transmission from IT resource to better business process performance is explicated, allowing simultaneous parameter sensitivity analysis and contributing to making the RBV applicable and open for empirical research

The Role of Alignment for Strategic Information Systems: Extending the Resource Based Perspective of IT

The importance of strategic information systems (SIS) in the financial industry is documented in many studies. But still there is a virulent lack of frameworks to explain the profit impact of IT in general and to guide firms in exploiting the IT resource as a source of competitive advantage. By incorporating findings from the resource based view (RBV) and strategic alignment literature we elaborate key concepts potentially leading to a sustained competitive advantage (SCA). Supported by four case studies from the financial services industry, our findings suggest that the exploitation of SIS for achieving SCA requires IT business alignment based on organizational routines of cross-departmental interaction. These concepts are explicitly modeled and integrated into a formal model using microeconomic theory. Especially interactions between the IT and business domain are found to be a key success driver

Mixed-Methods in Information Systems Research: Status Quo, Core Concepts, and Future Research Implications

Mixed-methods studies are increasing in information systems research, as they deliver robust and insightful inferences combining qualitative and quantitative research. However, there is considerable divergence in conducting such studies and reporting their findings. Therefore, we aim (1) to evaluate how mixed-methods studies have developed in information systems research under the existence of heavily used guidelines and (2) to reflect on those observations in terms of potential for future research. During our review, we identified 52 mixed-methods papers and quantitatively elaborated on the adherence to the three core concepts of mixed-methods in terms of purpose, meta-inferences, and validation. Findings discover that only eight adhere to all three of them. We discuss the significance of our results for current and upcoming mixed-methods research and derive specific suggestions for authors. With our study, we contribute to mixed-methods research by showing how to leverage the insights from existing guidelines to strengthen future research and by contributing to the discussion of the legislation associated with research guidelines, in general, presenting the status quo in current literature

Is the source strong with you? A fit perspective to predict sustained participation of FLOSS developers

Despite the notable success of some Free Libre Open Source (FLOSS) projects, the overwhelming majority of FLOSS initiatives fail, mostly because of insufficient long-term participation of developers. In contrast to previous research which focuses on the individual perspective, we approach developer retention from an organizational perspective to help existing project members identify potential long-term contributors who are worth spending their time on. Methodically, we transfer two concepts from professional recruiting, Person-Job (P-J) and Person-Team (P-T) fit, to the FLOSS domain and evaluate their usage to predict FLOSS developer retention. An empirical analysis reveals that both fit concepts are appropriate to explain FLOSS retention behavior. Looking at contributor retention in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects, we find a moderate correlation with P-J fit and a weak correlation with P-T fit