The paper develops a needs–affordances–features (NAF) perspective on social media use which posits that individuals’ psychological needs motivate their use of social media applications to the extent ...to which these applications provide affordances that satisfy these needs. Our theoretical development builds upon two psychological theories, namely self-determination and psychological ownership, to identify five psychological needs (needs for autonomy, relatedness, competence, having a place, and self-identity), that we posit are particularly pertinent to social media use. According to NAF, these psychological needs will motivate use of those social media applications that provide salient affordances to fulfill these needs. We identify such affordances through a comprehensive review of the literature and of social media applications and put forth propositions that map the affordances to the psychological needs that they fulfill. Our theory development generates important implications. First, it has implications for social media research in that it provides an overarching comprehensive framework for the affordances of social media as a whole and the related psychological needs that motivate their use. Future studies can leverage NAF to identify psychological needs motivating the use of specific social media sites based on the affordances the sites provide, and design science research can leverage NAF in the design and bundling of specific social media features to engage users. Second, it has implications for technology acceptance research in that NAF can enrich existing models by opening up the mechanisms through which psychological needs influence user perceptions of social media and their use patterns and behaviors. Finally, NAF provides a new lens and common vocabulary for future studies, which we hope can stimulate cumulative research endeavors to develop a comprehensive framework of information systems affordances in general and the psychological needs that information systems satisfy.
Prior research shows that a good record of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has an insurance‐like effect on shareholder value in negative events. We posit and provide empirical evidence that ...excessive CSR activities can also cause a boomerang effect during negative events. In the setting of product recalls, we show that overinvestment in CSR has a boomerang effect on shareholder value when a company with excessive CSR activities announces a recall. Further analysis shows that the boomerang effect is exacerbated when institutional ownership is low or when customer awareness is high. Our study adds to the literature new insights on how CSR affects shareholder value during a reputation crisis.
While prior research has established that information technology (IT) investment has a significant impact on firm performance, relatively few studies have provided insights into the antecedents of IT ...investment decisions. By integrating the behavioral theory of the firm and agency theory, we propose a behavioral agency theory to explain performance shortfalls and corporate governance, which monitors and controls managers' tendency of overinvestment or underinvestment in IT, as key drivers that jointly determine IT investment. As such, IT investment facilitates a firm's problemistic search that generates innovation in response to performance gaps. We further examine the role of innovation outputs as a mediating mechanism linking IT investment to firm performance. Our econometric analysis of a large-scale panel dataset provides empirical evidence corroborating our theory. Overall, this study contributes a behavioral agency theory to deepen our understanding about performance drivers and outcomes of IT investment decisions.
Grounded in the diffusion of innovation theory and the technology-organization-environment framework, we develop an integrative model to study the determinants of post-adoption stages of innovation ...diffusion, using enterprise digital transformation as an example of technology-enabled innovations. We specify four innovation characteristics (relative advantage, compatibility, costs and security concern) and four contextual factors (technology competence, organization size, competitive pressure and partner readiness) as determinants of post-adoption usage, and postulate usage as an intermediate link to impact on firm performance. We test the proposed model using a dataset of 1415 companies from six European countries. We find that the innovation needs to be used extensively in value-chain activities before its impact can be realized. Among the innovation characteristics, we find that compatibility is the strongest driver, and security concern outweighs cost as a usage inhibitor. Among the contextual variables, technology competence, partner readiness and competitive pressure significantly drive e-business usage, and the structural inertia of large firms tends to slow down its penetration. Collectively, these results indicate that innovation diffusion can be better understood by including both innovation characteristics and contextual factors, whereas earlier literature has traditionally treated the two separately. Finally, we evaluate an international dimension among European countries and tease out important boundary conditions that would not have been evident in a single-country dataset. Our results show that careful attention must be paid to the economic and regulatory factors that may result in uneven innovation diffusion even among developed European countries.
As firms seek to improve coordination through the use of electronic interorganizational systems (IOS), open standards are becoming increasingly important. To better understand the process of ...standards diffusion, we investigate firms' migration from proprietary or less-open IOS (i.e., electronic data interchange or EDI) to open-standard IOS (i.e., the Internet). Theoretical work in economics suggests that network effects are a determinant of network adoption, yet the extant literature falls short of empirical testing of the theory. We develop a conceptual model that features network effects, expected benefits, and adoption costs as prominent antecedents. We examine the model on a large dataset of 1,394 firms. The empirical results demonstrate the significant impacts of network effects on open-standard IOS adoption. We find that adoption costs are a significant barrier to open-standard IOS adoption, but EDI users and nonusers treat this very differently: EDI users are much more sensitive to the costs of switching to the new standard. This finding illustrates that experience with older standards may create switching costs and make it difficult to shift to open and potentially better standards, a phenomenon called "excess inertia" in technology change. Further testing the underlying factors that contribute to network effects and adoption costs, we find that trading community influence is a key driver of network effects, while managerial complexity, as opposed to financial costs, is a key determinant of adoption costs. Overall we believe that this study, based on a rigorous empirical analysis of a unique international dataset, provides valuable insights into a set of key factors that influence standards diffusion.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how customer relationship management (CRM) implementation affects internal capital allocation efficiency, the efficiency with which a firm ...allocates its capital across its business segments.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use a statistical regression method to analyze a sample of 801 unique firms in the USA from COMPUSTAT and the Computer Intelligence database. This analysis examines the relation between CRM implementation and internal capital allocation efficiency and identifies the conditions under which firms benefit more from CRM implementation. They also use instrumental variables (IVs) to address endogenous concerns with a two-stage least squares (2SLS) model.
Findings
The authors find that CRM implementation is positively related to internal capital allocation efficiency. The results are robust to the 2SLS analysis with IVs. This positive relation is more pronounced for firms with effective internal control and for those operating in highly competitive markets.
Practical implications
The research implies that that CRM can have a significant cross-functional effect on corporate financing and budgeting. This also suggests that when chief marketing officers plan marketing initiatives and implement CRM, they should communicate to chief financial officers not only the direct effect but also the indirect strategic benefits of such initiatives to a firm.
Originality/value
The authors reveal a previously overlooked aspect of marketing accountability by suggesting marketing’s impact on internal capital markets. They also enrich the body of literature on CRM benefits by showing a cross-functional benefit from marketing to finance (or capital allocation).
This study investigates the financial and operational implications of enterprise systems (ESs) in corporate risk management. Using matched difference‐in‐differences analyses based on ES ...implementation events, we document a significant reduction in the volatility of operating cash flows following ES implementations. We further show that ES implementers have better post‐implementation operational efficiency than matched non‐ES firms and better manage sales, costs of sales, working capital, and operating expenses to reduce operating cash flow volatility. Consistent with the benefits of lower cash flow volatility documented in prior literature, we find ES implementers demonstrate higher investment efficiency, lower reliance on external financing, and higher debt capacity post‐ES‐implementation than the matched non‐ES firms. Our study sheds light on the economic benefits of utilizing ESs in corporate risk management and in so doing responds to the paucity of empirical research in this area.
Résumé
Mise en place de systèmes d’entreprise et volatilité des flux de trésorerie
Cette étude examine les répercussions financières et opérationnelles des systèmes d’entreprise (SE) sur la gestion des risques des entreprises. Des analyses en doubles différences appariées reposant sur des activités de mise en place de SE révèlent une réduction significative de la volatilité des flux de trésorerie d’exploitation à la suite de mises en place de SE. Comparativement aux entreprises appariées sans SE, les auteurs démontrent en outre que les entreprises mettant en place des SE ont une meilleure efficacité opérationnelle à la suite de la mise en place et qu’elles gèrent mieux les ventes, les couts de vente, les fonds de roulement et les dépenses opérationnelles afin de réduire la volatilité des flux de trésorerie d’exploitation. Conformément aux avantages liés à une plus faible volatilité des flux de trésorerie documentés dans des études antérieures, les auteurs observent, comparativement aux entreprises appariées sans SE, que les entreprises mettant en place des SE démontrent une plus grande efficacité d’investissement, une plus faible dépendance au financement externe et une plus grande capacité d’endettement à la suite de la mise en place de SE. La présente étude met en lumière les avantages économiques de l’utilisation des SE dans la gestion des risques des entreprises et répond ainsi à la rareté des recherches empiriques dans ce domaine.
The Information Systems research community has a complex relationship with theory and theorizing. As a community of scholars, our assumptions about theory and theorizing affect every aspect of our ...intellectual lives. Ideas about what theory is, who theorizes, where theory comes from, when we theorize, how theory is developed and changes, and why theory is (or isn't) important shapes the projects we do, the partnerships we have, the resources available to us, and phenomena that we find to be significant, interesting, and novel. Dspite its prominent place in our thinking, it is often difficult to critically examine the assumptions we make about theory and theorizing. Our assumptions affect our priorities, decision, and actions. How we think about theory and its role in our individual and collective intellectual lives is a product of complex paths and multiple influences. Although we may try to stay mindful of how our assumptions shape our perspectives and ways of thinking, from time to time we need to look beyond them. The short papers presented here highlight and challenge some core assumptions. Each provocatively engages with one or more assumptions about theory, theorizing, and/or their implications for IS research. In doing so, these authors engage and contribute to the long tradition of reflecting on theory and theorizing. They challenge us to return to these dialogues anew as the worlds we study and the ones we inhabit change. Readers will also find healthy differences in opinion across the provocations. We expect the diversity in these provocations will inspire thought and reflection as much as the strong views within each one.
Managing firm risk, or firm performance volatility, is a key task for contemporary firms. Although information technology (IT) has been generally viewed as an effective information processing tool ...that enables firms to better cope with uncertainty, thus holding the potential to mitigate firm performance volatility, evidence to support this view is lacking in the literature. We theorize that enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, a major type of enterprise IT applications, can help reduce firm risk and, in particular, we argue that, to uncover the risk reduction effect of ERP systems, a research focus on the post-implementation stage is needed. Based on a sample of 2,127 firm-year observations, we found that ERP systems in the post-implementation stage were associated with reduced firm risk, and that the risk reduction effect was stronger for ERP systems with a greater scope of functional and operational modules, especially functional modules. We further found that, on average, the risk reduction effect of ERP systems became greater when firms’ operating environments feature higher uncertainty, while the risk reduction associated with fully deploying ERP system modules seem to level off as environmental uncertainty increases. These findings extend our understanding of the business value of ERP systems by shedding light on the risk reduction benefit of ERP systems.
This work examines the question of who is more likely to provide future helpful reviews in the context of online product reviews by synergistically using personality theories and data analytics. It ...trains a deep learning model to infer a reviewer’s personality traits. This enables analyses to reveal the role of personality traits in review helpfulness among a large population of reviewers. We develop hypotheses on how personality traits are associated with review helpfulness, followed by hypotheses testing that confirms that higher review helpfulness is related to higher openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness and to lower emotional stability. These results suggest the appropriateness of using these five personality traits as inputs for developing a model for predicting future review helpfulness. Based on an ensemble model using supervised classification algorithms, we develop a predictive model and demonstrate its superior performance. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
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