Greg Rawski

Technology acceptance model (TAM) and social media usage: an empirical study on Facebook

Purpose – Given the widespread popularity of social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn, theorizing and understanding the user attitude and usage behavior of social media site is fundamental in developing future understandings and deployment of these new technologies. One approach to such studies on drivers of social media usage behavior would be to revisit the technology acceptance model (TAM). The purpose of this paper is to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Decades of extensive research have focussed on validating the TAM, proposed by Davis (1986), for various types of information systems and communication technologies. TAM forecasts individual adoption and voluntary use of technology. This study examines individual adoption behavior of the most popular social networking site Facebook. The influences on the intention of using social networking based on individuals perceived ease of use (EU), the users critical mass (CM), social networking site capability (CP), pe...

Organizational Integration for Product Development: The Effects on Glitches, On-Time Execution of Engineering Change Orders, and Market Success

Deviations from requirements during the product development process can be considered as glitches. Fixing glitches, or problems, during the product development process consumes valuable resources, which may adversely affect product development time and hamper the firm’s goal to pursue a first-mover advantage. It is posited that an integrated organizational response can diminish incidences of glitches and improve the ability of the firm to respond to engineering changes, subsequently leading to improved market success. This organizational response frequently includes heavyweight product development managers who are seen as essential catalysts for internal integration. Though internal integration is vital, it is equally important to integrate with customers and suppliers alike because such network partners can provide access to information, knowledge, and unique and complementary resources that are otherwise unavailable to the firm. Findings, which are based on a sample of 191 product development projects in the automotive industry, suggest that some integration routines have a positive impact on product development outcomes and market success, while other routines can in fact hamper the collective effort.

The role of heavyweight product manager in new product development

Purpose – This paper seeks to empirically investigate how a heavyweight product manager (HW) can impact the cross‐functional team and project performance (PP) through actively influencing the ways and the extent of strategic alignment (SA), shared project mission, and clarity of project targets in the early front‐end stage.Design/methodology/approach – Based on past studies on leadership role theory and goal‐setting theory for teams, this study hypothesizes that the role of the HW for SA of the project, shared project mission, and clarity of the project target are positively related. The study further hypothesizes that these roles of the HW can have a positive impact on PP measures such as product cost, time, and customer satisfaction.Findings – Primary data collected from 191 new product development (NPD) projects from the US automotive industry were analyzed using structural equation modeling techniques. All the hypotheses presented in this study regarding the role of the HW in a cross‐functional team a...

Benchmarking sustainability practices: evidence from manufacturing firms

Purpose – With increasing emphasis on the environment, firms are required to include sustainability practices at all levels – strategic, operational, and outcome measures. The purpose of this paper is to present a research model that defines sustainability practices in the context of the competitive business environment, strategic driver, operational and supply chain practices, and performance outcomes.Design/methodology/approach – This paper identifies research gaps in the areas of integration of sustainability practices across functional levels within firms and across networks. In total, 379 companies were analyzed in structural equation modeling.Findings – This study has three important findings: First, firms striving for responsiveness to market and customers also improve environmental performance; second, this study confirms lean practices as an important mediator to achieve excellent environmental performance; third, the focal company takes the lead in achieving environmental performance, and suppli...

Social Media User Satisfaction—Theory Development and Research Findings

Online social media, such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn continue to influence and penetrate peoples lives from multiple dimensions: communal, commercial, political, religious, and so forth. Motivated by developing a good understanding of such social media user behavior and user satisfaction, the current study develops a theoretical model of social media user satisfaction that incorporates constructs such as value to the user, content, critical mass, capability, timeliness, perceived privacy, ease of use, and format of a social media. The current researchers hypothesize eight positive relationships between the theoretical constructs and user satisfaction in the model. Using a sample size of 398 from the users of Facebook, all eight hypotheses proposed in the model were supported by the data. Discussion of research findings, limitations of the current studies, and direction for future studies are also provided.

Creating a distinctive business career outcome programme

Abstract This article describes how a small private business school, accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, reengineered its career services programme to become a premier programme in the United States. Drawing on theory of involvement, the research gives business schools a strategy to improve business career placement through capital support, student engagement, corporate engagement, alumni engagement, faculty engagement and continuous improvement initiatives. Further, two major outcome categories (i.e. supportive outcomes and end outcomes) are identified and various measures are discussed. Supportive outcomes indicate growth in the number of on-campus business recruiting career events, high internship evaluations by internship supervisors and significant increase in students’ satisfaction with career services. End outcomes provide strong evidence for placement rate success with a 98% career placement rate for the past four years, significant increase on mean starting salaries of graduates across the years following the implementation of the strategic changes, improved quality of positions attained by graduates, and professional success of alumni in their positions. The impact of strategic changes on school ranking, enrolment and donor support are also discussed. The research proposes a model of student career success and identifies various elements influencing the success of such programmes.

Antecedents And Consequences Of Ippd Effectiveness

Team is the primary mechanism through which product development projects are executed. Despite regular theoretical discussions on the importance of cross-functional team and concurrent engineering to improve new product development projects, empirical studies on consequence of integrated product and process development (IPPD) effectiveness on teamwork is largely missing in existing product development literature. IPDD projects execute concurrent activities that go through several iterations before the deliverable of each stage are finalised. Based on information processing theory and goal-setting theory for team, this study hypothesise shared project mission, clarity of the project target, and customer and supplier involvement positively influences effectiveness of IPPD project. We further hypothesise that such effective IPPD leads to teamwork which can have a positive impact on project performance in terms of product development cost, product development time, and customer satisfaction. Primary data collected from 191 IPPD projects from U.S. automotive industry were analysed using structural equation modelling technique. All the hypotheses representing antecedents of effective IPPD and the consequence of effective IPPD were found to be supported in the current study.

Performance evaluation of a centralised web-based integrated information system across the supply chain

In this paper, we re-examine a previous theoretical model of information success to assess the performance of centralised web-based information system (IS) that is integrated into the service operations of the supply chain. The field research is carried out using survey data collected from the different users of centralised student loan IS across the supply chain of the student loan industry. We use DeLone and McLean’s (2003, 2004) well-recognised e-commerce success framework that has gained theoretical acceptance among researchers. In the current study, we provide a detailed empirical analysis of the industry by segmenting our data into B2B and B2C categories. Discussion of our empirical results, implications to practitioners and researchers, limitations of the current study and directions for future research are also provided.

Collective Ambition, Creative Chaos, Information Redundancy, and Shared Knowledge in Integrated Product Development - Case Study

The use of cross-functional teams in integrated product development (IPD) has become a common practice in industry. Despite an extant body of literature on the importance of knowledge management in cross-functional team execution, the drivers of knowledge sharing in cross-functional teams in IPD projects have not been adequately addressed. Knowledge sharing among the IPD team members help in complex problem solving and decision-making during the course of the concurrent project environment. In this article we present findings on knowledge sharing in IPD projects from our interviews with project executives from four diverse companies. Based on social cognitive and information processing theories, the current case study proposes a theoretical framework on some of the important determinants of shared knowledge. An understanding of such determinants can help managers in IPD to promote information and knowledge sharing which may lead to superior IPD project performance.