Earticle

To provide a fundamental understanding on the inherent relationship between IT capabilities and sustainable firm heterogeneity, we investigate the dual roles that institutional pressures play, namely, as antecedents of IT capabilities and as moderator of the relationship between IT capabilities and IT innovation success, where IT innovation success plays a mediating role between IT capabilities and firm performance. The structural model was tested, and the results of the PLS analysis provided general support for the proposed hypotheses. IT capabilities had an indirect effect mediated by IT innovation success on firm performance. With IT activities assumed to be embedded in the institutional context, the dual roles of institutional pressures are verified. This study contributes to the literature on IT capabilities by considering both the determining role of institutional pressures on IT capabilities and the institutional context of the chain that connects IT capabilities to firm performance. The results suggest that a firm not only manages various institutional pressures to foster its IT capabilities but also adapts to different contexts with a certain level of institutional pressures to facilitate its IT capabilities and outperform its competitors, which could be sustained through IT innovation success.

The ubiquitous accessibility of information through mobile devices has led to an increased mobility of workers from their fixed workplaces. Market researchers estimate that by 2016, 350 million workers will be using their smartphones for business purposes, and the use of smartphones will offer new business benefits. Enterprises are now adopting mobile technologies for numerous applications to increase their operational efficiency, improve their responsiveness and competitiveness, and cultivate their innovativeness. For these reasons, various organizational aspects concerning “mobile work” have received a great deal of recent attention. Moreover, many CIOs plan to allocate a considerable amount of their budgets mobile work environments. In particular, with the consumerization of information technology, enterprise mobile applications (EMA) have played a significant role in the explosive growth of mobile computing in the workplace, and even in improving sales for firms in this field. EMA can be defined as mobile technologies and role-based applications, as companies design them for specific roles and functions in organizations. Technically, EMA can be defined as business enterprise systems, including critical business functions that enable users to access enterprise systems via wireless mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablets. Specifically, EMA enables employees to have greater access to real-time information, and provides them with simple features and functionalities that are easy for them to complete specific tasks. While the impact of EMA on organizational workers’ productivity has been given considerable attention in various literatures, relatively little research effort has been made to examine how EMA actually lead to users’ job performance. In particular, we have a limited understanding of what the key antecedents are of such an EMA usage outcome. In this paper, we focus on employees’ perceived job performance as the outcome of EMA use, which indicates the successful role of EMA with regard to employees’ tasks. Thus, to develop a deeper understanding of the relationship among EMA, its environment, and employees’ perceived job performance, we develop a comprehensive model that considers the perceived-fit between EMA and employees’ tasks, satisfaction on EMA, and the organizational environment. With this model, we try to examine EMA to explain how job performance through EMA is revealed from both the task- technology fit for EMA and satisfaction on EMA, while also considering the antecedent factors for these constructs. The objectives of this study are to address the following research questions: (1) How can employees successfully manage EMA in order to enhance their perceived job performance? (2) What internal and/or external factors are important antecedents in increasing EMA users’ satisfaction on MES and task- technology fit for EMA? (3) What are the impacts of organizational (e.g. organizational agility), and task- related antecedents (e.g., task mobility) on task-technology fit for EMA? (4) What are the impacts of internal (e.g., self-efficacy) and external antecedents (e.g., system reputation) for the habitual use of EMA?Based on a survey from 254 actual employees who use EMA in their workplace across industries, our results indicate that task-technology fit for EMA and satisfaction on EMA are positively associated with job performance. We also identify task mobility, organizational agility, and system accessibility that are found to be positively associated with task-technology fit for EMA. Further, we find that external factor, such as the reputation of EMA, and internal factor, such as self-efficacy for EMA that are found to be positively associated with the satisfaction of EMA. The present findings enable researchers and practitioners to understand the role of EMA, which facilitates organizational workers' efficient work processes, as well as the importance of task-technology fit for EMA. Our model provides a new set of antecedents and consequence variables for a TAM involving mobile applications. The research model also provides empirical evidence that EMA are important mobile services that positively influence individuals’ performance. Our findings suggest that perceived organizational agility and task mobility do have a significant influence on task-technology fit for EMA usage through positive beliefs about EMA, that self-efficacy and system reputation can also influence individuals’ satisfaction on EMA, and that these factors are important contingent factors for the impact of system satisfaction and perceived job performance. Our findings can help managers gauge the impact of EMA in terms of its contribution to job performance. Our results provide an explanation as to why many firms have recently adopted EMA for efficient business processes and productivity support. Our findings additionally suggest that the cognitive fit between task and technology can be an important requirement for the productivity support of EMA. Further, our study findings can help managers in formulating their strategies and building organizational culture that can affect employees perceived job performance. Managers, thus, can tailor their dependence on EMA as high or low, depending on their task’s characteristics, to maximize the job performance in the workplace. Overall, this study strengthens our knowledge regarding the impact of mobile applications in organizational contexts, technology acceptance and the role of task characteristics. To conclude, we hope that our research inspires future studies exploring digital productivity in the workplace and/or taking the role of EMA into account for employee job performance.

Traditionally, organizations have innovated themselves with their internal resources. However, due to the rapid development of technology and the frequent changes in the business environment, organizations have begun to open their innovation process advocating the importance of the customer role. One of the approaches is crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing, a composite word of “crowd” and “outsourcing” is coined by Jeff Howe in 2006. This new concept is based on the belief that a diverse crowd is often wiser at making decisions than expert individuals. As a result, many organizations across diverse industries are now crowdsourcing their ideation efforts in an attempt to get new ideas into their innovation process. In light of this, crowdsourcing is drawing attention from academic researchers as well as practitioners. Considering that the goal of idea crowdsourcing is harnessing innovative ideas, understanding the characteristics of user-favorable and organization-adoptable ideas can enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the crowdsourcing. However, existing studies mainly have been conducted in conceptual level. Therefore, in our approach, we question what are the factors that affect user preference and organization adoption. Referring to the related studies in Web 2.0 area including social media and online review, we extracted idea content based characteristics such as idea subjectivity, idea negativity, idea pro-socialness, and depth of idea. In this paper, we define that idea subjectivity and idea negativity mean the extent to which the idea is presented in a subjective and negative manner respectively. Idea pro-socialness means whether or not the idea asks the organization to do good for the society. Depth of idea represents the extent to which the idea is described in detail. Based on previous studies, we hypothesize that an idea with high subjectivity, negativity, pro-socialness and depth has a positive effect on its being user favorable and organization adoptable. We empirically validate the effects of the characteristics of user ideas on organization-adoption and user -favorableness using the dataset from MSI (MyStarbucksIdea.com). We collected 71,134 ideas posted on MSI, which was launched by Starbucks in 2008 and is currently one of the most successful idea crowdsourcing communities. Our analysis of the user ideas in MSI shows that there exist significant differences between user-favorable and organization-adoptable ideas in terms of idea characteristics. That is, ideas high in subjectivity and low in negativity tend to be favored by the users, while ideas low in negativity and depth, and high in pro-socialness are likely to be adoptable to the organization. Theoretically, we deepen our understanding about opinion acceptance behaviors in a crowdsourcing community, which contrast with the results of prior studies. Managerially, our findings are expected to contribute to mitigate the challenges in crowdsourcing community such as information overload problem caused by too much idea to be processed.

Our study adopted ELM (Elaboration Likelihood Model) to measure the impact of central and peripheral cues on e-healthcare website behavior and its consequence on perceived loyalty of users. While most of ELM studies did not elaborate the antecedent of both central and peripheral cues, we measured the antecedents of those information processing routes to clarify how technical and quality factors (i.e. information organization, security concern, and website attractiveness) develop the nature of either central or peripheral route. We found that information organization was the main antecedent of information quality presented on the website. Second, the results revealed that website security has a positive effect on website credibility. Third, we also found that website attractiveness was positively associated with website credibility. Fourth, consistent with elaboration likelihood model, the empirical findings suggested that information quality (central cue) and website credibility (peripheral cue) were strong predictors of behavior intention to use health website. Our findings also suggested that behavior intention to use health website significantly influenced perceived loyalty.

As personal data breach reared up as a problem domestically and globally, organizations appointing chief privacy officers (CPOs) are increasing. Related Korean laws, 'Personal Data Protection Act’ and 'the Act on Promotion of Information and Communication Network Utilization and Information Protection, etc.’ require personal data processing organizations to appoint CPOs. Research on the characteristics and role of CPO is called for because of the importance of CPO being emphasized. There are many researches on top management’s role and their impact on organizational performance using the Upper Echelon theory. This study investigates what influence the characteristics of CPO gives on the organizational privacy performance. CPO’s definition varies depending on industry, organization size, required responsibility and power. This study defines CPO as 'a person who takes responsibility for all the duties on handling the organization’s privacy,’This research assumes that CPO characteristics such as role, personality and background knowledge have an influence on the organizational privacy performance. This study applies the part relevant to the upper echelon’s characteristics and performance of the executives (CEOs, CIOs etc.) for CPO. First, following Mintzberg and other managerial role classification, information, strategic, and diplomacy roles are defined as the role of CPO. Second, the "Big Five" taxonomy on individual’s personality was suggested in 1990. Among these five personalities, extraversion and conscientiousness are drawn as the personality characteristics of CPO. Third, advance study suggests complex knowledge of technology, law and business is necessary for CPO. Technical, legal, and business background knowledge are drawn as the background knowledge of CPO. To test this model empirically, 120 samples of data collected from CPOs of domestic organizations are used. Factor analysis is carried out and convergent validity and discriminant validity were verified using SPSS and Smart PLS, and the causal relationships between the CPO’s role, personality, background knowledge and the organizational privacy performance are analyzed as well. The result of the analysis shows that CPO’s diplomacy role and strategic role have significant impacts on organizational privacy performance. This reveals that CPO’s active communication with other organizations is needed. Differentiated privacy policy or strategy of organizations is also important. Legal background knowledge and technical background knowledge were also found to be significant determinants to organizational privacy performance. In addition, CPOs conscientiousness has a positive impact on organizational privacy performance. The practical implication of this study is as follows: First, the research can be a yardstick for judgment when companies select CPOs and vest authority in them. Second, not only companies but also CPOs can judge what ability they should concentrate on for development of their career relevant to their job through results of this research. Cultural social value, citizen’s consensus on the right to privacy, expected CPO’s role will change in process of time. In future study, long-term time-series analysis based research can reveal these changes and can also offer practical implications for government and private organization’s policy making on information privacy.