Prelims

Half Title Page

Information Technology in Organisations and Societies

Title Page

Information Technology in Organisations and Societies: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from AI to Technostress

EDITED BY

ZACH W. Y. LEE

Durham University, UK

TOMMY K. H. CHAN

Northumbria University, UK

AND

CHRISTY M. K. CHEUNG

Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

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First edition 2021

Copyright © 2021 Emerald Publishing Limited

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ISBN: 978-1-83909-813-0 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83909-812-3 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-83909-814-7 (Epub)

Dedication

To my parents, who have taught me to be kind.

Zach W. Y. Lee

Tommy would like to dedicate this book to master Minho.

Tommy K. H. Chan

For everyone, may you be blessed with good health and happiness.

Christy M. K. Cheung

To all who have interest in learning about the impacts of information technology on our work and life.

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

About the Editors

Zach W. Y. Lee is an Associate Professor at Durham University Business School and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. His research interests include organisational and societal implications of IT use, social media, online consumer behaviours, and digital service innovation. He has published in international journals such as Industrial Marketing Management, Information Systems Journal, Information & Management, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Journal of Management Information Systems and among others. Zach serves as an Associate Editor of Internet Research and is an editorial board member of Industrial Management & Data Systems and Journal of Computer Information Systems.

Tommy K. H. Chan is a Senior Lecturer at Northumbria University. Tommy’s research interests include societal implications of information technology uses and online consumer behaviours. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Management Information Systems, Information & Management, Information Systems Journal, and Industrial Marketing Management. He serves as an Associate Editor at Internet Research and is on the editorial board at Industrial Management & Data Systems and Journal of Computer Information Systems. He has served as track co-chair, associate editor and programme committee of various tracks at international conferences on information systems.

Christy M. K. Cheung is a Professor and the Director of Research Postgraduate Programme of School of Business at Hong Kong Baptist University. She is the awardee of the RGC Senior Research Fellow scheme with the funding to advance research into the role of technology in the formation, prevention, and intervention of online collective deviant behaviour. She has published over one hundred refereed articles in international journals and conference proceedings, including MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, and Journal of the Association for Information Systems. Christy is currently the President of the Association for Information Systems (AIS-Hong Kong Chapter). She also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Internet Research.

About the Contributors

David Biros is an Associate Professor of Management Science and Information Systems and Fleming Chair of Information Technology Management at Oklahoma State University. A retired Lieutenant Colonel of the United States Air Force, Dr Biros’ last assignment was as Chief, Information Assurance Officer for the AF-CIO. His research interests included deception detection, insider threat, and information system trust. He has published in MIS Quarterly, the Journal of Management Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, Group Decision and Negotiation, MISQ Executive, the Journal of Digital Forensics Security and Law and other journals and conference proceedings.

Sven Laumer is the Schöller Endowed Professor and Chair of Information Systems at the School of Business, Economics and Society at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and Deputy Director of the Dr. Theo und Friedl Schöller Research Center. His research focuses on digital work and life. His research has been published or will appear among others in MIS Quarterly, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, European Journal of Information Systems, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, and Journal of Information Technology. He serves on editorial boards of Information Systems Journal and The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems. He has been awarded the Young Talent Award 2018 by the German Academic Association of Business Research (VHB). When he is not working, he enjoys being a soccer referee, hiking in the Alps, and spending time with friends and family.

Christian Maier is an Assistant Professor at the University of Bamberg, Germany. Dr Maier’s research interests are anchored around the IS use lifecycle, including the adoption, usage, and discontinuous usage of digital technologies in the private and organisational domain. He uses, among others, theoretical lenses of IS use stress, coping, and resistance. His work appears in JAIS, EJIS, ISJ, JSIS, JIT, and he is the winner of the honorable Schmalenbach prize for young researchers (2015) and the prestigious Early Career Awards by the AIS (2019) and the ACM SIGMIS (2020).

Hanne Westh Nicolajsen holds a position as Associate Professor in the Department of Business IT at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and until 2020, was the Head of the Industrial Master’s program in IT Management. Her research focusses on the management of implementation and adaptation of information systems as part of organisational change projects. Currently, she researches organisational innovation systems with a particular focus on the involvement of employees and technostress. Hanne has published her research so far in Creativity and Innovation Management, Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing, Journal of E-Business Research, Library Management, and International Journal of E-services and Mobile Applications.

Forough Nasirpouri Shadbad is a PhD Candidate in the Management Science and Information Systems department at Oklahoma State University. Her research focusses on intentional/unintentional insider threats, technostress, gamification, and information privacy in social networking sites. She has published in Information Technology & People, Journal of Computer Information Systems, and in the proceedings of the Americas Conference on Information Systems, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, and other proceedings.

Madhav Sharma is a PhD Student, studying Management Science and Information Systems at Oklahoma State University. His research interests include Diffusion of Innovation, Use and Implication of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Internet of Things. He has published in the Cutter Business Technology Journal, Journal of Mid-west Association of Information Systems, Journal of Information Systems Education along with many other conference proceedings.

Alet Smith is the General Manager of the data science capability at a South African telecommunications company and responsible for driving the organisation’s data strategy. Alet started her career in information technology. Motivated by her passion for data, innovation and design science, she has successfully led and managed several key business intelligence-related initiatives in the Telecommunications industry. She is a visionary and energetic leader, who has grown and developed resources from graduate status into fully-fledged data subject matter experts. She demonstrates exemplary leadership through an effective engagement approach and her ability to unlock and drive value from the organisational data. Currently, Alet is a PhD candidate in the Information Systems department at the University of Pretoria. The title of her study is A Big Data Value Framework for the Data-driven Organisation.

Hanlie Smuts is an Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics in the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology, University of Pretoria. Prior to joining the University, during her tenure in the industry, she was involved in the promotion of digital transformation, driving growth through personalised digital offerings and empowering customers through convenient and effective self-service. Her thorough understanding of the digital and adjacent ecosystems also enabled her to implement digital financial solutions for the mass markets in South, East, and West Africa. Her current research focuses on information systems and the organisation, with particular emphasis on digital transformation, disruptive technologies, and the management of big data and knowledge. The combination of these research areas enables cross-domain research in the field of knowledge visualisation as an organisational tool, as well as collaboration between human and machine knowledge for knowledge-related work. Hanlie is a National Research Foundation rated researcher and has published several papers and book chapters in her field of study.

Raluca Stana is a PhD Fellow at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, in the Department of Business IT. Her research focusses on leadership, technostress, and obligation. Raluca teaches classes on leadership and technostress and collaborates closely with practitioners. She has a practitioner’s background, working with leadership, Big Data, and IT systems implementation in a large corporation, where she has experienced technostress personally and in her team.

Dimple R. Thadani is currently an Assistant Professor in Information Systems at Nottingham University Business School (NUBS) China. Prior to joining UNNC, Dimple was a Lecturer (School of Business) and an Administrative Staff (Teaching and Learning Centre) at Hong Kong Baptist University. Dimple received her PhD from City University of Hong Kong in 2013. Her research interests include social media, leadership and online collaborative games, e-commerce, and e-learning. She has published in international journals and leading information systems conference proceedings. Dimple received the best PhD Student Award at the 4th World Summit on the Knowledge Society.

Xuewei Yang is a Postgraduate Student at Durham University. She also holds a BA (Hons) degree with First Class in International Business from Coventry University. Her research interests include online consumer behaviours, social marketing, and evolutionary consumer psychology.

Preface

Information technology (IT) use is typically regarded as a positive phenomenon that generates desirable outcomes. However, the negative consequences of IT use have been increasingly witnessed in recent years. For instance, individual users may experience ‘technostress’ from personal social media use and IT use in the workplace, and organisations may experience losses in productivity and assets due to employees’ failure to comply with information security policies. Thus, researchers have called for further investigation into the negative and positive effects of IT use.

This book, Information Technology in Organisations and Societies: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from AI to Technostress, contains multidisciplinary research on the positive and negative aspects of IT use at both the individual and organisational levels, and covers emerging phenomena and topics ranging from artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality, and organisational transformation to technostress. The book endeavours to provide contrasting views on the positive aspects and outcomes of digitisation and on the potential harms induced or exacerbated by advanced IT. The book also presents innovative discussions on strengthening the benefits of IT use and mitigating its drawbacks.

The studies in this book examine the implications of IT along a continuum from the organisations to the individual. The book starts with chapters on examining the implications of IT specific to the organisational context, and includes studies on the implications of AI for organisations, the organisational transformation framework for data-driven decision-making, and the relationships between technostress and employees’ non-compliance with information security policies. Later chapters address the implications of IT in relation to organisations as well as individual users and consumers, with studies that develop an integrative framework for cognitive absorption, examine technostress in the workplace through sociological mechanisms, and explore the impacts of augmented reality on experiential marketing. The final chapters examine the impacts of IT specifically at the individual level, including an examination of the relationship between self-disclosure on social networking sites (SNSs) and well-being, and a literature review on social media stress. The diversity of the studies is also manifested geographically, with contributors from institutions and organisations across Africa, Asia, Europe, and America; methodologically, by using case study, design science, interview, literature review, and survey approaches; and theoretically, with theories ranging from organisational transformation frameworks, sociological mechanisms, the person–artifact–task model, the stimulus–organism–response model, and the hyperpersonal communication model, to the transactional model of stress arising from the use of SNSs.

The book represents a collective effort not only to consolidate studies on emerging issues and phenomena related to the positive and negative aspects of IT use but also to prescribe future research avenues in connected research domains. The book adds to the growing body of knowledge on the multifaceted nature and outcomes of IT use. It is particularly relevant and appealing to academics and researchers working on IT use research, and should serve them well as a handy reference to the field.

The first chapter of the book, by Madhav Sharma and David Biros, presents an overview of the implications of AI for organisations through a discussion of the core components of AI, the organisational goals that could be achieved with AI, the various types of AI, and their interrelationships. The authors also cover the unintended consequences and vulnerabilities of using AI systems in an organisational setting. The chapter offers a balanced discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of AI systems, and concludes with recommendations for organisations on the development and implementation of AI.

The second chapter, by Hanlie Smuts and Alet Smith, presents an organisational transformation framework for data-driven decision-making (OTxDD) based on a collaboration between humans and machines. The authors use the design science research approach to develop the OTxDD framework, which consists of four major enablers (data analytics, data management, data platform, and data-driven organisation ethos) and twelve sub-enablers, together with an organisational measurement tool. Organisations can use the OTxDD framework and the measurement tool to create a transformation path to data-driven decision-making, applying insights from both knowledge workers and intelligent machines.

While the adoption and diffusion of advanced IT can enhance individual and organisational performance, there are some negative aspects, such as technostress and information security threats. In the third chapter, Forough Nasirpouri Shadbad and David Biros propose a conceptual model to explain the relationships between technostress and employees’ non-compliance with information security policies, suggesting that a higher level of perceived technostress is associated with a higher likelihood of employees violating such policies. Measures to reduce technostress and mitigate organisational security threats are discussed.

The fourth chapter, by Raluca Stana and Hanne Westh Nicolajsen, examines IT-related technostress in the workplace using sociological mechanisms. Having identified a lack of investigation of the social environment in which technostress arises, the authors examine technostress in the workplace through the sociological lens of obligation. They use an embedded case study in Denmark to examine political materials and interview employees from multiple organisations. The findings suggest that technostress may be socially constructed, and the authors suggest that a future research direction could be to view technostress as a societal responsibility.

With the growing interest in the uses of hedonic technologies and the gamification of system design, the concept of cognitive absorption, a holistic experience arising from technology use, has become increasingly important in explaining IT usage behaviours at both the organisational and the individual levels. The fifth chapter, by Christy M. K. Cheung, Dimple R. Thadani, and Zach W. Y. Lee, proposes an integrative framework of cognitive absorption in technology use that summarises the antecedents and consequences of cognitive absorption. The framework offers a foundation for future theory building and provides system developers with practical insights into the design of next-generation hedonic and immersive technologies.

The sixth chapter, by Xuewei Yang, continues with an examination of a particular emerging immersive technology, augmented reality, in the context of experiential marketing. Drawing on the stimulus–organism–response model, the author proposes and tests a research model that explains the effects of augmented reality media characteristics on consumers’ value perceptions, and how these influence their purchase intentions. The findings show that augmented reality media characteristics positively influence consumers’ utilitarian and hedonic value perceptions. The study provides marketers with insights into implementing digital transformation strategies and augmented reality applications in marketing practices.

The proliferation of SNSs has changed how we communicate, network, and socialise with others. The seventh chapter, by Tommy K. H. Chan, explores how social anxiety influences self-disclosure on SNSs and its effect on well-being. Drawing on the hyperpersonal communication model, the author advances a research model to explain how social anxiety leads to self-disclosure on SNSs. The author also hypothesises that online disinhibition has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between social anxiety and self-disclosure. This study enhances our understanding of the self-disclosure patterns of socially anxious individuals on SNSs, providing practitioners and educators with insights into how intimate relationships and a higher level of social interaction with others can be fostered.

The eighth chapter, by Sven Laumer and Christian Maier, presents a literature review on technostress and social networking sites (SNSs). The authors propose a transactional model of SNS use stress. The model shows that social and technical SNS-stressors trigger psychological, physiological, and behavioural reactions (i.e. SNS-strains). Specifically, social SNS-stressors and psychological and behavioural SNS-strains have been found extensively examined in the literature. The chapter concludes by identifying research gaps and offering implications for researchers, SNS users, SNS providers, organisations, and parents to help them prevent and intervene in SNS use stress.

Research on the positive and negative implications of IT across organisations and individuals has gained momentum, and the broad reach of this edited book contributes to the movement. We hope that both researchers and practitioners will enjoy reading the book and will derive new insights that inform their future research and practice. We thank the contributors and the publisher for making this book possible.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the contributors of this book, David Biros, Sven Laumer, Christian Maier, Forough Nasirpouri Shadbad, Hanne Westh Nicolajsen, Madhav Sharma, Alet Smith, Hanlie Smuts, Raluca Stana, Dimple R. Thadani, and Xuewei Yang, for committing to the work and for engaging with the editors in a friendly, professional, and collegial manner. We would also like to thank colleagues from the institutes of the editors, who have provided constructive feedback to the development of this book and its initial proposal.

Lastly, we would like to express our gratitude to Emerald Publishing and their editorial team for producing and publishing this book. This book would not have been possible without their support.

Zach W. Y. Lee, Tommy K. H. Chan and Christy M. K. Cheung