Authors: Y. Yu, Warut Khern-am-nuai and Alain Pinsonneault
Publication: MIS Quarterly, Forthcoming
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Published on: 9 Feb 2021
Authors: B. Pentland, Emmanuelle Vaast and J. Ryan Wolf
Publication: MIS Quarterly, Forthcoming
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The growing availability of digital trace data has generated unprecedented opportunities for analyzing, explaining, and predicting the dynamics of process change. While research on process organization studies theorizes about process and change, and research on process mining rigorously measures and models business processes, there has so far been limited research that measures and theorizes about process dynamics. This gap represents an opportunity for new Information Systems (IS) research. This research note lays the foundation for such an endeavor by demonstrating the use of process mining for diachronic analysis of process dynamics. We detail the definitions, assumptions, and mechanics of an approach that is based on representing processes as weighted, directed graphs. Using this representation, we offer a precise definition of process dynamics that focuses attention on describing and measuring changes in process structure over time. We analyze process structure over two years at four dermatology clinics. Our analysis reveals process changes that were invisible to the medical staff in the clinics. This approach offers empirical insights that are relevant to many theoretical perspectives on process dynamics.
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Published on: 13 Nov 2020
Authors: Emmanuelle Vaast and Alain Pinsonneault
Publication: MIS Quarterly, Forthcoming
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Occupations are increasingly embedded with and affected by digital technologies. These technologies both enable and threaten occupational identity and create two important tensions: they make the persistence of an occupation possible while also potentially rendering it obsolete and they bring about both similarity and distinctiveness of an occupation with regard to other occupations. Based on the critical case study of an online community dedicated to data science, we investigate longitudinally how data scientists address the two tensions of occupational identity associated with digital technologies and reach transient syntheses in terms of “optimal distinctiveness” and “persistent extinction.” We propose that identity work associated with digital technologies follows a composite life-cycle and dialectical process. We explain that people constantly need to adjust and redefine their occupational identity (i.e., how they define who they are and what they do). We contribute to scholarship on digital technologies and identity work by illuminating how people deal in an ongoing manner with digital technologies that simultaneously enable and threaten their occupational identity.
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Published on: 13 Nov 2020
Authors: K.-Y. Huang, I. Chengalur-Smith, and Alain Pinsonneault
Publication: MIS Quarterly: Management Information Systems, Volume 43, Issue 2, June 2019, Pages 395-423
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Individuals increasingly rely on healthcare virtual support communities (HVSCs) for social support and companionship. While research provides interesting insights into the drivers of informational support in knowledge-sharing virtual communities, there is limited research on the antecedents of emotional support provision and companionship activities in HVSCs. The unique characteristics of HVSCs also justify the need to reexamine members’ voluntary provisions of help in such communities. This paper develops a model that examines the relationships between the structural, relational, and cognitive dimensions of social capital and the provision of informational and emotional support, and engagement in companionship activities in HVSCs. The model is tested based on data generated through an automated method that classifies and analyzes user-generated text in three healthcare virtual support communities (breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer). The results show that all three dimensions of social capital impact the provision of emotional support; both structural and relational capital facilitate engagement in companionship activities; and only cognitive capital enables the provision of informational support. Research and practical implications on the need to facilitate informational and emotional support provision and companionship activities in healthcare virtual support communities are discussed.
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Published on: 24 Jul 2019
Authors: H. Liang, Y. Xue, Alain Pinsonneault and Y. Wu
Publication: MIS Quarterly: Management Information Systems, Volume 43, Issue 2, June 2019, Pages 373-394
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This paper investigates how individuals cope with IT security threats by taking into account both problem-focused and emotion-focused coping. While problem-focused coping (PFC) has been extensively studied in the IT security literature, little is known about emotion-focused coping (EFC). We propose that individuals employ both PFC and EFC to volitionally cope with IT security threats, and conceptually classify EFC into two categories: inward and outward. Our research model is tested by two studies: an experiment with 140 individuals and a survey of 934 respondents. Our results indicate that both inward EFC and outward EFC are stimulated by perceived threat, but that only inward EFC is reduced by perceived avoidability. Interestingly, inward EFC and outward EFC are found to have opposite effects on PFC. While inward EFC impedes PFC, outward EFC facilitates PFC. By integrating both EFC and PFC in a single model, we provide a more complete understanding of individual behavior under IT security threats. Moreover, by theorizing two categories of EFC and showing their opposing effects on users’ security behaviors, we further examine the paradoxical relationship between EFC and PFC, thus making an important contribution to IT security research and practice.
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Published on: 24 Jul 2019
Authors: Bogdan Negoita, Liette Lapointe and Suzanne Rivard
Publication: MIS Quarterly, Vol. 42 Issue 4, 1281-1301, 2018
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As the nature of information systems (IS) has evolved from primarily standalone, to enterprise, and distributed applications, the need for a better understanding of collective IS use has become a research and practical necessity. In view of contributing to this understanding, we conceptually define collective IS use as a unit level construct, rooted in instances of individual-level IS use within the context of a common work process. Its emergence from the individual to the unit level is shaped by different configurations of task, user, and system interdependence between instances of individual-level IS use. On the basis of this definition, we propose a typology of collective IS use that comprises four ideal types, namely siloed use, processual use, coalesced use, and networked use. For each ideal type, we theorize on the emergence process from the individual to the unit level and we consider the measurement implications for each.
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Published on: 23 Apr 2019
Authors: JaeHwuen Jung, Ravi Bapna, Jui Ramaprasad and Akhmed Umyarov
Publication: MIS Quarterly, Forthcoming
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The proliferation of smartphones and other mobile devices has led to numerous companies investing significant resources in developing mobile applications, in every imaginable domain. As apps proliferate, understanding the impact of app adoption on key outcomes of interest and linking this understanding to the the underlying mechanisms that drive these results is imperative. In this paper, we explore the changes in user behavior induced by adoption of a mobile application, in terms of engagement and matching outcomes in the online dating context. We also identify three mechanisms that are somewhat unique to the mobile environment, but are hitherto unestablished in the literature, that drive this shift in behavior – ubiquity, impulsivity and disinhibition. Our main identification strategy uses propensity score matching combined with difference-in-differences, coupled with a rigorous falsification test to confirm the validity of our identification strategy. Our results demonstrate that mobile app adoption induces users to become more socially engaged as measured by key engagement metrics such as visiting significantly more profiles, sending significantly more messages, and importantly, achieving more matches. We also discover various mechanisms facilitating this increased engagement: ubiquity of mobile use – users login more, and login across wider range of hours in the day. We find that men act more impulsively, in that they are less likely to check the profile of a user who messaged them before replying to them. This effect is not visible for women who continue to be deliberate in their checking before replying even after adoption of the mobile app. Finally, we find that both men and women exhibit disinhibition, in that users initiate actions to a more diverse set of potential partners than they did before on dimensions of race, education and height.
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Published on: 26 Mar 2018
Social media has become a part of everyday life. We enjoy the contact Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., provide with friends and family, and, indeed, the world.
Sometimes we gripe about the downsides of the technology. People say it’s a time suck. There’s fake news. It’s hard to trust what you see.
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Published on: 18 Jan 2018
Authors: Emmanuelle Vaast, Hani Safadi, Liette Lapointe, and Bogdan Negoita
Publication: MIS Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4, 2017, pp. 1179-1205
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This research questions how social media use affords new forms of organizing and collective engagement. The concept of connective action has been introduced to characterize such new forms of collective engagement in which actors coproduce and circulate content based upon an issue of mutual interest. Yet, how the use of social media actually affords connective action still needed to be investigated.
Mixed methods analyses of microblogging use during the Gulf of Mexico oil spill bring insights to this question and reveal, in particular, how multiple actors enacted emerging and interdependent roles with their distinct patterns of feature use. The findings allow us to elaborate upon the concept of connective affordances as collective level affordances actualized by actors in team interdependent roles. Connective affordances extend research on affordances as a relational concept by considering not only the relationships between technology and users but also the interdependence type among users and the effects of this interdependence onto what users can do with the technology. This study contributes to research on social media use by paying close attention to how distinct patterns of feature use enact emerging roles.
Adding to IS scholarship on the collective use of technology, it considers how the patterns of feature use for emerging groups of actors are intricately and mutually related to each other.
Read full article: MIS Quarterly
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Published on: 17 Oct 2017
Authors: Srinivas Kuduravalli, Samer Faraj and Steven L. Johnson
Publication: MIS Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1, March 2017
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Despite the recognition of how important expertise coordination is to the performance of software development teams, understanding of how expertise is coordinated in practice is limited. We adopt a configural approach to develop a theoretical model of expertise coordination that differentiates between design collaboration and technical collaboration. We propose that neither a strictly centralized, top-down model nor a largely decentralized approach is superior. Our model is tested in a field study of 71 software development teams. We conclude that because design work addresses ill-structured problems with diverse potential solutions, decentralization of design collaboration can lead to greater coordination success and reduced team conflict. Conversely, technical work benefits from centralized collaboration. We find that task knowledge tacitness strengthens these relationships between collaboration configuration and coordination outcomes and that team conflict mediates the relationships. Our findings underline the need to differentiate between technical and design collaboration and point to the importance of certain configurations in reducing team conflict and increasing coordination success in software development teams. This paper opens up new research avenues to explore the collaborative mechanisms underlying knowledge team performance.
Read full article: MIS Quarterly
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Published on: 17 Oct 2017
Authors: H. Liang, Y. Xue, Alain Pinsonneault and A. Wu
Publication: MIS Quarterly, Forthcoming
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This paper investigates how individuals cope with IT security threats by taking into account both problem-focused and emotion-focused coping. While problem-focused coping (PFC) has been extensively studied in the IT security literature, little is known about emotion-focused coping (EFC).
We propose that individuals employ both PFC and EFC to volitionally cope with IT security threats, and conceptually classify EFC into two categories: inward and outward. Our research model is tested by two studies: an experiment with 140 individuals and a survey of 934 respondents.
Our results indicate that both inward EFC and outward EFC are stimulated by perceived threat, but that only inward EFC is reduced by perceived avoidability. Interestingly, inward EFC and outward EFC are found to have opposite effects on PFC. While inward EFC impedes PFC, outward EFC facilitates PFC. By integrating both EFC and PFC in a single model, we provide a more complete understanding of individual behavior under IT security threats.
Moreover, by theorizing two categories of EFC and showing their opposing effects on users’ security behaviors, we further examine the paradoxical relationship between EFC and PFC, thus making an important contribution to IT security research and practice.
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Published on: 17 Oct 2017
Authors: Shamel Addas and Alain Pinsonneault
Publication: MIS Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 2, January 2018
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Interruption of work by e-mail and other communication technologies has become widespread and ubiquitous. However, our understanding of how such interruptions influence individual performance is limited. This paper distinguishes between two types of e-mail interruptions (incongruent and congruent) and draws upon action regulation theory and the computer-mediated communication literature to examine their direct and indirect effects on individual performance.
Two empirical studies of sales professionals were conducted spanning different time frames: a survey study with 365 respondents and a diary study with 212 respondents. The results were consistent across the two studies, showing a negative indirect effect of exposure to incongruent interruptions (interruptions containing information that is not relevant to primary activities) through subjective workload, and a positive indirect effect of exposure to congruent interruptions (interruptions containing information that is relevant to primary activities) through mindfulness.
The results differed across the two studies in terms of whether the effects were fully or partially mediated, and we discuss these differences using meta-inferences. Technology capabilities used during interruptions episodes also had significant effects: rehearsing (fine-tuning responses to incoming messages) and reprocessing (reexamining received messages) were positively related to mindfulness, parallel communication (engaging in multiple e-mail conversations simultaneously) and leaving messages in the inbox were positively related to subjective workload, and deleting messages was negatively related to subjective workload.
This study contributes to research by providing insights on the different paths that link e-mail interruptions to individual performance and by examining the effects of using capabilities of the interrupting technology (IT artifact) during interruptions episodes. It also extends the experimental tradition that focuses on isolated interruptions. By shifting the level of analysis from specific interruption events to overall exposure to interruptions over time and from the laboratory to the workplace, our study provides realism and ecological validity.
Read full article: MIS Quarterly
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Published on: 17 Oct 2017
Authors: Bapna, R., Ramaprasad , J., Umyarov , A.
Publication: MIS Quarterly, 42(3), 719-735
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Making sustainable profits from a baseline zero price and motivating free consumers to convert to premium subscribers is a continuing challenge for all freemium communities. Prior research has causally established that social engagement (Oestreicher-Singer and Zalmanson 2013) and peer influence (Bapna and Umyarov 2015) are two important drivers of users converting to premium subscribers in such communities. In this paper, we flip the perspective of prior research and ask whether the decision to pay for premium subscription causes users to become more socially engaged. In the context of the Last.fm music listening freemium social community, we establish, using a novel 41 month long panel dataset, a look-ahead propensity score matching (LA-PSM) procedure coupled with a difference-in-difference estimator of the treatment effect, that payment for premium leads to more social engagement. Specifically, we find that paying for premium leads to an increase in both content-related and community-related social engagement. Free users who convert to premium listen to 287.2% more songs, create 1.92% more playlists, exhibit a 2.01% increase in the number of forum posts made, and gain 15.77% more friends. Thus, premium subscribers create value not only for themselves by consuming more content, but also for the community and site by organizing more content and adding more friends, who are subsequently engaged by the social diffusion emerging from the focal user’s activities.
Read full abstract: MISQ, December 15, 2016
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Published on: 11 Jan 2017
Professor Lapointe has been appointed Associate Editor of the Management Information Systems Quarterly (MISQ) Journal. The MIS Quarterly is a peer reviewed scholarly journal published by the Management Information Systems Research Center, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota.
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Published on: 3 Jul 2015
