Ali Alper Yayla

The impact of IT-business strategic alignment on firm performance in a developing country setting: exploring moderating roles of environmental uncertainty and strategic orientation

Aligning information technology (IT) strategy with business strategy has been one of the top concerns of practitioners and scholars for decades. Although numerous studies have documented positive effects of IT-business alignment on organizational performance, our knowledge about this relationship is still limited due to the complexity of contingent factors. The extant literature is largely based on research in the context of developed countries and few studies have explicitly considered the effects of contextual factors such as market environment and competitive strategy on this relationship. In this study, we attempt to fill these gaps by testing the alignment–performance relationship in a developing country setting and investigating the moderating roles of environmental uncertainty and strategic orientation on the performance effects of strategic alignment using survey data collected in Turkey. Our analyses show that this positive effect is statistically significant in highly uncertain environments and varies across performance measures. Our results also show that the strategic alignment between IT and business has a significant impact on performance across all choices of strategic orientation – defender, prospector, or analyzer. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed and future research directions are explored.

The impact of information security events on the stock value of firms: the effect of contingency factors

The stock market reactions to information technology (IT)-related events have often been used as proxies to the value or cost of these events in the information systems literature. In this paper, we study the stock market reactions to information-security-related events using the event analysis methodology with consideration of the effects of a number of contingency factors, including business type, industry, type of breach, event year, and length of event window. We found that pure e-commerce firms experienced higher negative market reactions than traditional bricks-and-mortar firms in the event of security breach. We also found that denial of service attacks had higher negative impact than other types of security breaches. Finally, security events occurred in recent years were found to have less significant impact than those occurred earlier, suggesting that investors may have become less sensitive to the security events. Most interestingly, our analyses showed that the magnitude and longevity of security breaches vary with time across sub-samples. This raises some serious questions regarding the validity of analyzing only short-term stock market reactions as an indicator of the cost of security breaches, and in general, an indicator of the value of IT-related events. The implications of these results are discussed and potential future research directions are proposed.

Is There an On-line Advertisers' Dilemma? A Study of Click Fraud in the Pay-Per-Click Model

This study develops a theoretical model, based on the theory of reasoned action and the concept of behavioral calculus, for understanding on-line advertiser behavior. Structural equation modeling and survey data are used to test hypotheses on how beliefs about on-line pay-per-click advertising shape the attitudes and subjective norms that lead advertisers to advertise on-line. The roles of trust, third-party tools, and support from search engine providers are explored. The study confirms that attitudes and subjective norms significantly influence intention to advertise on-line using the pay-per-click model, but trust in search engine providers and third-party monitoring and filtering tools are also found to have central roles. Trust can significantly increase the perceived benefits, in addition to its direct positive impact on attitude and subjective norms. The perceived effectiveness of third-party tools has a positive impact on attitude and trust, and thus on intention to advertise on-line.

Institutional environment for entrepreneurship: evidence from the developmental states of South Korea and United Arab Emirates

The purpose of this research is to examine country institutional profile for encouraging entrepreneurial activity in two developmental states: South Korea and United Arab Emirates. Data was collected from business students in the two countries to examine the favorability of their institutional environment for entrepreneurship. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated high reliability, construct validity and internal consistency for the Korean and Arabic language versions of the questionnaire instrument in the respective countries. Results revealed important cross-national differences between the two countries in the regulatory, cognitive and normative dimensions of the institutional environment. Implications, limitations and future research directions are discussed.

The Effect of Board of Directors’ IT Awareness on CIO Compensation and Firm Performance

Chief information officers (CIOs) play increasingly strategic roles in firms in this competitive global economy, which is now largely powered by information technology (IT). However, research has shown a lack of board of directors� oversight on CIO- and IT-related issues. Drawing on agency, resource dependence, and alignment theories, we investigate the effect of board of directors� IT awareness on CIO compensation structure and firm performance. We conduct cross-sectional time series analyses of data collected from various sources. Our study underlines three important findings. First, we show that some commonly known executive compensation determinants, such as individual characteristics and governance structure, do not have significant effects on CIO compensation structure. Second, with regard to CIO compensation structure, firms respond to increasing information asymmetry differently according to the level of IT awareness of their boards. Finally, firms perform better when their boards have higher levels of IT awareness, and this positive effect of IT awareness is considerably larger in IT intensive industries. Overall, our study provides empirical support for the important role of boards� IT awareness in shaping CIO compensation and improving firm performance. Our results suggest that boards with functional area knowledge�or higher IT awareness in this case�can more effectively monitor and better incentivize executives, and consequently lead to better firm performance.

Does Inclusion of CIO in Top Management Team Impact Firm Performance? Evidence from a Long-Term Event Analysis

Inclusion of chief information officers (CIOs) in top management teams (TMTs) increases the functional and knowledge diversity of the teams, and elevates the role of IT in strategic business decisions. Considering that firms are increasingly relying on IT for operational efficiency and competitive advantage, TMTs with IT diversity can be expected to have superior performance compared to those without. While many studies have argued conceptually the importance of CIOs membership in TMTs, very few studies examined the performance effects of this membership. The goal of this study is to investigate this relationship. Moreover, we consider contingency factors that may have an effect on the focal relationship. Using firm-level secondary data and long-term event study methodology, we show that inclusion of CIO in TMT has a significant positive effect on firm performance, and this positive effect is larger for firms in dynamic environments and during the more recent years.

Guiding the Herd: The Effect of Reference Groups in Crowdfunding Decision Making

Despite their popularity, crowdfunding platforms are experiencing negative headlines as fully funded projects continue to fail delivering the products on time. Current literature postulates that funders make decisions by following the decisions of the crowd, and this herd behavior leads to less than optimal decisions. One explanation of the negative externalities of such behavior is the misfit between the information provided by the crowd and the information needed by funders. Especially in patronage crowdfunding, funders are investors and buyers at the same time. This duality coupled with the lack of supervision of projects creates unique challenges. In addition to opportunism uncertainty, funders face competence uncertainty. This study provides evidence that social information gathered from reference groups decrease these uncertainties. Further investigation showed that different reference groups provide different types of social information and product complexity plays a role in the uncertainties experienced and the importance given to different reference groups.

Information security policies and value conflict in multinational companies

The purpose of this paper is to examine challenges multinational companies face during the diffusion of their information security policies. Parent companies use these policies as their discourse for legitimization of their practices in subsidiaries, which leads to value conflicts in subsidiaries. The authors postulate that, when properly crafted, information security policies can also be used to reduce the very conflicts they are creating.,The proposed framework is conceptualized based on the review of literatures on multinational companies, information security policies and value conflict.,The authors identified three factors that may lead to value conflict in subsidiary companies: cultural distance, institutional distance and stickiness of knowledge. They offer three recommendations based on organizational discourse, ambidexterity and resource allocation to reduce value conflict.,The authors postulate that information security policies are the sources of value conflict in subsidiary companies. Yet, when crafted properly, these policies can also offer solutions to minimize value conflict.,The proposed framework can be used to increase policy diffusion success, minimize value conflict and, in turn, decrease information security risk.,The growing literature on information security policy literature is yet to examine the diffusion of policies within multinational companies. The authors argue that information security policies are the source of, and solution to, value conflict in multinational companies.