1,721,159 research outputs found
Integrating and Synthesising Technostress Research: A Meta-Analysis on Technostress Creators, Outcomes, and IS Usage Contexts
No full textOne app to trace them all? Examining app specifications for mass acceptance of contact-tracing apps
No full textBuilding and testing a roadmap for developing digital work practices : a maturity model approach
No full textAlthough employees are one of the crucial elements in each organization and their level of work satisfaction is critical to the efficiency of a business, their work impression is still undergoing scrutiny when it gets to digital process innovations. Moreover, organizations still benefit from assistance in their adoption of digital-oriented work practices, for which a related maturity model (MM) can be one of the solutions. The current Ph.D. plan consists of three research projects that follow a mixed-method approach with a combination of quantitative and qualitative designs, within an overall design of Design-Science Research (DSR). Project 1 has two subprojects (i.e., a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and a data-driven analysis). It starts with analyzing the relevant literature from a people–process–technology (PPT) perspective to extract relevant factors when digitalizing business processes. Afterwards, it investigates a representative set of European employee data using statistical data analysis (e.g., factor analysis and ANOVA) and data mining (e.g., clustering) techniques to delve into the impact of digital-oriented work practices on work satisfaction. After this artefact identification, we continue with Project 2 (i.e., expert panel, case study) to add evidence for a maturity-based gradation along with the identified clusters of digital-oriented work practices. Finally, Project 3 helps concretize the intended MM by focusing on the relationships with employee satisfaction and the relevant. Our findings will assist organizations to upgrade their work practices (i.e., including assessment and improvement advice), while simultaneously empowering their employees
Toward a framework for alleviating technostress: The role of affect state
No full textThe objective of this dissertation proposal is to design a general framework for interventions aimed at alleviating the impact of technostress, that is, stress occurring when individuals use information technology (IT) devices. Initially noted as a modern disease of adaptation due to the inability of individuals to cope with IT, technostress is increasing in scope and becoming a serious health concern. IT use has generally enhanced individual and workplace productivity but is creating high levels of technostress among individuals, reducing their task performance, and leading to long-term health consequences. High levels of stress directly impact a person’s health and is a demonstrated risk factor for anxiety, depression, and cardiovascular diseases, as well as for diabetes and obesity, because stressed people crave for food high in sugar and fat.
Researchers have recognized technostress, alerted us to its detrimental effects on health, identified specific stressors, such as interruptions through pop-ups, but research has not fully addressed methods that can be enacted by individuals to alleviate technostress. Furthermore, affect, although mentioned as an important factor in stress, has not been investigated as regard to technostress. Using the findings on the interplay between affect and stress in the neurophysiology literature, our study addressed this gap by investigating the role played by individuals’ affect state in shaping their response to a stimulus. Hence, we propose a framework that integrates the biological underpinnings and the psychological processes of stress and set affect as an important construct in this framework. We posit that the user’s affect can be leveraged to minimize the negative effects of episodic stressors during their interactions with technology. In this proposal, affect is defined as a neurophysiological state resulting from the evaluation by individuals of a specific stimulus to which they are exposed, and we focus on stimuli occurring during an individual’s interaction with technological devices. A stimulus evaluated as bad will result in a negative affect state, while a stimulus assessed as good will result in a positive affect state. Feeling is the conscious experiencing of an affect state.
Affect state can impact the individual’s attention scope, cognitive flexibility, and appraisal of stimuli that arise from their environment. Based on the neurophysiological underpinnings of stress, we posit that an individual’s affect state is a moderator of the relationship between exposure to a stimulus and the appraisal processes of that stimulus. More specifically, users in a positive affect state are less likely to assess a stimulus as distressful compared to their counterparts in a neutral or negative affect state (primary appraisal). Moreover, if the stimulus is appraised to be a distressful stimulus, users in a positive affect state are more likely to appraise the distress as controllable (secondary appraisal) and adopt a more effective coping strategy compared to their counterparts in a neutral or a negative affect state. Proceeding from these observations, we present a framework that emphasizes the roles played by affect state, appraisal, and coping strategies in the stress process, and how affect influences both appraisal and coping to shape an individual’s response to a stimulus.
To test our hypotheses, we conducted an online randomized controlled experiment with individuals at least 18 years old recruited from a university campus. During the experimental session, we induced specific affect states in the participants at the beginning of the session, and then ask them to perform a cognitive task on a computer while they are being exposed to frequent pop-up messages, which are identified in prior IS research as stimuli that could create technostress. There were three experimental groups reflecting three different induced affect states (positive; negative; or neutral). These affect states were induced by asking the participants to look at pictures selected the from the Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS; Marchewka et al. 2014) that have been demonstrated to induce different affect states.
Technostress being a biopsychological response, we used a combination of perceptual and physiological measures to record the participants’ response to the experimental stimuli. The perceptual measures included questionnaires of affect, cognition, and stress appraisal. The physiological measures consisted of participants’ facial expressions.
Our study found that positive affect state was associated with appraising pop-up messages as less of a threat compared to negative affect state. Also, individuals in the positive affect condition appraised the pop-up messages to be more controllable and were more likely to adopt adaptive coping strategies (positive reframing, planning, and active coping) compared to participants in a negative affect state. Finally, participants’ task performance was influenced by the type of coping strategies they had adopted to deal with the pop-up messages, with support seeking and maladaptive coping being associated with lower performance scores.
Our research contributes to the emergent science on technostress by suggesting methods to alleviate impact of stressors, and provides guidelines for managing technostress to individuals and public policy makers. From a theoretical standpoint, we propose a framework that incorporates the biological mechanisms of stress and addresses the role of affect in shaping the stress response. From a methodological perspective, we use a combination of perceptual and physiological methods to gauge individuals’ stress response, demonstrating the value of non-invasive methods such as facial expressions as objective tools for measuring individuals’ responses to episodic stressors
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Control of Algorithmic Work on Digital Labor Platforms: Stories from Two Sides
No full textDigital labor platforms (DLPs) digitally connect human workers (i.e., service providers) with service consumers. Examples of DLPs include Uber, Deliveroo, Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), Upwork etc. Mediated by DLPs, humans interact with algorithms to accomplish work such as driving taxis, delivering food, and executing Human Intelligence Tasks on platforms such as MTurk. This type of work is known as algorithmic work. DLPs use algorithms to digitally manage and control work allocation, worker behaviors and worker–customer interaction. However, DLPs differ from traditional organizations in terms of workers’ independent contractor status and a technologically mediated task environment. The practice of managerial control in DLPs is thus different from that in traditional organizations. How are workers on DLPs controlled? Current IS research has mostly answered this question using the concept of algorithmic control (AC), which is defined as using algorithms as a means to align worker behaviors with controllers’ objectives. However, in focusing on AC, the current literature reveals a number of problematic scenarios. First, human workers often do not fully understand the outputs generated by the algorithms and the mechanisms behind the outputs, leading to them experiencing confusion, role conflict and role ambiguity. Second, algorithms cannot make fair judgements on ambiguous and complex issues, such as reasons for late food deliveries and validity of customer negative ratings. Third, AC is associated with loss of autonomy, privacy and identification by the workers, which is detrimental to worker well-being. These examples show how AC does not provide adequate explanation and feedback to workers, cannot make contextually appropriate decisions in ambiguous situations, and does not take interpersonal and empathetic considerations into account when making judgments. The objective of this dissertation is to investigate how the control of algorithmic work on DLPs can be accomplished through both AC and non-AC means, from the perspectives of both controllers (e.g., DLPs) and controlees (i.e., workers). To achieve this goal, we investigate (1) alternative control means in addition to AC, from the controllers’ perspective, and (2) workers' judgments and reactions to AC, from the controlees’ perspective. In the first paper, we ask the following research questions: how are workers on DLPs controlled? and how and why do control mechanisms influence workers’ judgments and reactions? To tackle these questions, we conduct a systematic literature review to synthesize the discussions of prior research and answer the research questions. We shed light on how workers are affected by AC, by using the Micro Level Legitimacy Process Model as the theoretical framework. Specifically, we illustrate granular AC mechanisms, worker judgments and reactions, and relevant AC characteristics that potentially moderate the relationships between AC mechanisms and worker judgements. Our analysis unveils mixed findings about legitimacy in literature, and we propose suggestions for future research accordingly. In the second paper, we conduct qualitative research to explain how DLPs control workers, from the perspective of controllers. The research question we ask is: how do humans and algorithms work together in the control of algorithmic work? We conducted interviews with 25 food delivery riders and managers who oversaw the riders. We found that human managers complement the capabilities of algorithms to enact algorithmic control. We theorize our findings as “the augmentation of algorithmic control by human control”. Specifically, human managers should augment AC by undertaking control mechanisms that are personalized, ambiguous, and emotionally impactful. That is because humans have more advanced capabilities in some areas, such as sensitivity to changing facts, intuitive thinking, common-sense based judgment, advanced communication, and interpretation of emotionalDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)2025-09-0
Examining tactical information technology - business alignment
No full textThe goal of strategic IT-business alignment has been to deploy IT applications that support business strategy. In spite of voluminous strategic IT plans and numerous studies on strategic IT-business alignment, accounts of wasted IT investments and deployment of business-irrelevant applications are rampant, indicating lack of alignment at the tactical level, that is, lack of execution-level processes addressing issues of resources, objectives and implementation-priority matching, between IT and the business. We answer the question: What are the aspects and outcomes of tactical IT-business alignment? We (1) identify six aspects of tactical IT-business alignment, and (2) show how they lead to four outcomes - implementation of planned applications, execution of IT-enabled aspects of business strategy, increased credibility of the IT function and increased business value from IT projects. Our results are based on qualitative primary data (45 hours of interviews with 28 IT and functional managers and company documents) from four organizations. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Tactical IT-business alignment : antecedents and outcomes
No full textThis article proposes the concept of “Tactical IT-Business Alignment”, as alignment between IT and other business functions at the operational and tactical levels. Based on in-depth case studies, it identifies five important aspects and three outcomes of Tactical IT-Business Alignment
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