The Effect of Dispositional Resistance to Change on Perceived Ease of Use

The introduction of new information systems often involves user resistance due to the changes associated with adopting new technologies. Therefore, it is important to understand how individuals’ resistance to change influences their perceptions of new technologies. Personality traits are commonly used in the psychology literature to explain human beliefs and behavior across different domains, and recently see a growing interest in the IS literature as an explanatory tool in the domain of technology related behavior. Research in social psychology has found Resistance to Change (RTC) to be a fundamental personality trait that influences individuals’ beliefs and behavior in situations involving change. In the present study we explore the relationship between RTC and Perceived Ease of Use, using a survey of 170 users of a digital library system. The preliminary findings suggest that RTC is a significant determinant of perceived ease of use. Implications of the findings are discussed

Trusting Social Location Technologies and Interactions

Social networks provide rich opportunities to interact with friends and other members. While research on motivations and interaction design help explain what makes online communities successful, the influence of trust on social location technologies and interactions that integrate online and off-line activities remains unclear. Drawing from research on information systems, social psychology, and social networks, we identify the drivers of users’ trust in social location artifacts and other subscribers. We will test our hypotheses on Facebook’s Places application by connecting surveys to actual usage data. We expect trust in the artifact to depend on usability, situation normality, perceived critical mass, and referrals from trusted sources. We also hypothesize that trust beliefs toward other users—split into friends and everyone else—will depend on instinctive feelings of trust, rationalizations that others won’t do harm, and structural assurances. Implications for theory and practice as well as limitations and future work are discussed

Information Systems and Creativity Management in the Media and Advertising Industries: A Critical View

Recent literature points to the increasing importance of creativity in organizational context and a positive relationship with organizational performance. While there is ample literature on the use of information systems (IS) to support the management of other drivers of organizational performance, the relationship between IS and creativity management in organizational context has received little attention. At the same time, it appears that creative processes, which are central in such industries as media and advertising, are difficult to order and manage. What is the nature then of the relationship between IS and the management of creativity in organisations? The paper addresses this issue by critically examining Amabile’s work on creativity management from an IS perspective – drawing on empirical findings from case studies in the media and advertising industries. While Amabile\u27s framework is found to provide a general creativity management framework applicable to the case of IS, it needs to be extended and refined. IS were found to support creativity, but also to undermine it if not managed carefully. The main organizational implications are: challenge, freedom, resources, work-group features, supervisory encouragement and organizational support are required, along with support for shared context and stimuli support, and caution against overemphasis of technological capabilities supporting creative production at the expense of creative ideation itself

Why People Tag? Motivations for Content Tagging

Tagging, or using keywords to annotate images, bookmarks, and blogs, is gaining much popularity. Since tagging is seen as an important change in the way images are organized and shared, we need to understand what drives this behavior. We draw on taxonomy of individual-level motivations for tagging, and research on the impact of social presence on tagging, and examine the drivers of tagging. We develop a scale of tagging motivations, which distinguishes between motivations stemming from three categories of intended audience: the taggers themselves, their family and friends, and the general public. Using multiple sources, including a survey and independent system data, we find that the levels of the Self and Public motivations, as well as social presence factor are positively associated with tagging level, and that the family & friends motivation is not associated significantly with tagging level. Implications of the research are discussed

Community Photo Sharing: Motivational and Structural Antecedents

In recent years there has seen a substantial growth of social computing. Content contribution from individual members is critical to the viability of social computing communities, and therefore it is important to understand what drives users to share content with others in such settings. We extend previous literature on user contribution by studying the factors that are associated with users’ photo sharing in a social computing community. We draw on motivation theories as well as on network structural properties analysis, two critical concepts in predicting user behavior in communities. Our results indicate that users with higher commitment to the community and greater structural embeddedness tend to share more, whereas enjoyment shows no effect on the level of sharing. Counter to our expectations, the motivation of self-development was negatively related to photo sharing. Directions for further development of this research, as well as implications for theory and practice are discussed

Knowledge management and creativity: a technology-facilitated balance

A growing body of literature discusses the importance of creativity in organizations. Together with the reliance of creativity on knowledge, and the increasing use of information systems (IS) as means to support organizational knowledge, research of the relationship between IS, knowledge and creativity in organizations seems to be in order. In this paper, evidence from case studies of real-world commercial creative processes is presented. Drawing on the evidence, the creativity, knowledge and IS literatures are critically examined. A view of channeled creativity is consequently presented and discussed that takes into account a cognitive perspective of creativity. This view focuses on flexible knowledge sharing, rather than on prescriptive creativity algorithms. This view involves primarily two complementary organizational practices: communication of exemplars and references, and knowledge restriction. Unlike many of the creativity support approaches presented in the literature, it is not an isolated technique but rather a set of fairly specific organizational practices, which, brought together, seem to give rise to creativity, and mitigate against potential identity conflicts

Personalityzation: UI Personalization, Theoretical Grounding in HCI and Design Research

Personalization is an effective means for accommodating differences between individuals. Therefore, the personalization of a system’s user interface (UI) features can enhance usability. To date, UI personalization approaches have been largely divorced from psychological theories of personality, and the user profiles constructed by extant personalization techniques do not map directly onto the fundamental personality traits examined in the psychology literature. In line with recent calls to ground the design of information systems in behavioral theory, we maintain that personalization that is informed by psychology literature is advantageous. More specifically, we advocate an approach termed “personalityzation”, where UI features are adapted to an explicit model of a user’s personality. We demonstrate the proposed personalityzation approach through a proof-of-concept in the context of social recommender systems. We identify two key contributions to information systems research. First, extending prior works on adaptive interfaces, we introduce a UI personalization framework that is grounded in psychology theory of personality. Second, we reflect on how our proposed personalityzation framework could inform the discourse in design research regarding the theoretical grounding of system’s design