Joey F. George

Information technology to support electronic meetings

As managers spend more of their time in meetings, the study of information technology to support meetings becomes increasingly important. Several unique systems to support meetings electronically have been developed in industry and universities. The PLEXSYS systems at the University of Arizona have been operational since 1985 and are now being implemented in industrial sites. This article proposes and defines a new term for information technology systems that support group meetings: electronic meeting systems (EMS). EMSs are more than group decision support systems (GDSS): they support more tasks than just decision making; they focus on communication. They move beyond the GDSS decision room where groups must meet at the same time in the same place, to meetings that can be conducted across time ands pace. The article then presents a model fo th EMS concept, which has three components: group process and outcomes; methods; and environment. Each of these component is explained in turn, and the implications derived form their study to date are discussed. Finally, the implementation of information technology for meeting support and its use in corporate settings will be addressed, as it has implications for productivity, meeting size, group member participat9ion, and the role of the IS department.

The theory of planned behavior and Internet purchasing

Several opinion polls have found that many consumers resist making purchases via the Internet because of their concerns about the privacy of the personal information they provide to Internet merchants. Using the theory of planned behavior as its basis, this study investigated the relationships among beliefs about Internet privacy and trustworthiness, along with beliefs about perceived behavioral control and the expectations of important others, and online purchasing behavior. Data were collected from 193 college students. Analysis of the data indicates that beliefs about trustworthiness positively affect attitudes toward buying online, which in turn positively affect purchasing behavior. Beliefs about self‐efficacy regarding purchasing positively affect perceived behavioral control, which in turn affects online purchasing behavior. In short, respondents who believed in the trustworthiness of the Internet and in their own abilities to buy online were more likely to make Internet purchases than were those without such beliefs.

It road warriors: balancing work-family conflict, job autonomy, and work overload to mitigate turnover intentions

This study examines the antecedents of turnover intention among information technology road warriors. Road warriors are IT professionals who spend most of their workweek away from home at a client site. Building on Moores (2000) work on turnover intention, this article develops and tests a model that is context-specific to the road warrior situation. The model highlights the effects of work family conflict and job autonomy, factors especially applicable to the road warriors circumstances. Data were gathered from a company in the computer and software services industry. This study provides empirical evidence for the effects of work family conflict, perceived work overload, fairness of rewards, and job autonomy on organizational commitment and work exhaustion for road warriors. The results suggest that work family conflict is a key source of stress among IT road warriors because they have to juggle family and job duties as they work at distant client sites during the week. These findings suggest that the context of the IT worker matters to turnover intention, and that models that are adaptive to the work context will more effectively predict and explain turnover intention.

A Study of Collaborative Group Work With and Without Computer-Based Support

As organizational environments become more turbulent and as managers spend more time in meetings in an effort to deal with that turbulence, using information technology to support meetings has become more important. This paper reports on an experiment that compared meetings supported by information technology to meetings with conventional manual support only. The experiment differs from most previous group decision support system (GDSS) experiments in that solutions to the task it used could be objectively scored, it introduced assigned leadership as an independent variable, and it is the first GDSS experiment to compare use of a subset of the University of Arizona GroupSystems GDSS tools to manual group methods. In addition to a communication condition (GDSS or manual) and assigned leadership, the experiment also investigated the effects of anonymity on group process and outcomes. The experiment found that GDSS groups were less likely to reach consensus, took more time to reach a decision, and had more e...

Influences on the intent to make Internet purchases

Using the theory of planned behavior as the theoretical base, data collected through a semi‐annual survey of Web users were used to determine if beliefs about privacy and Internet trustworthiness helped determine attitudes towards the Internet, which were thought to affect intent to make Internet purchases. Intent, in turn, was thought to affect actual purchasing behavior. Taking Internet experience into account, general support for the model was found.

Communication Concurrency and the New Media A New Dimension for Media Richness

An experiment investigated the ideational performance of groups using verbal or computer-mediated communication while face-to-face or distributed from one another. Groups using computer mediation outperformed groups using verbal communication. The proximity manipulation had no significant effects on performance. It is proposed that the difference between the new media (e.g., computer-mediated) and more traditional media (e.g., verbal) relates to the mediums concurrency—defined as the number of distinct communication episodes a channel can effectively support. Computer mediation can support an unlimited number of parallel and distinct communication episodes; traditional media support serial communication and therefore have a fundamentally different concurrency.

Using two different electronic meeting system tools for the same task: An experimental comparison

Abstract:Various aspects of the design and use of Electronic Meeting Systems (ems) have been investigated in laboratory and field studies, but until now no one has systematically investigated the role of ems software on group performance. The current study compares two different ems software tools in a controlled experiment. Dependent variables are decision quality, number of unique alternatives generated, satisfaction, and consensus. The study found that one software tool produced better quality solutions to a combination creativity and intellective task, but the other helped generate more unique alternatives. Each tool worked best on the task for which it was designed. The findings support the authors’ premise that there should be a match between the ems software tool and the task to be performed. The findings have several implications for the design of ems software.

Media Appropriateness in the Conduct and Discovery of Deceptive Communication: The Relative Influence of Richness and Synchronicity

We investigate the role that media synchronicity and media richness play in the particular communication context of deception. Hypotheses are developed based on prior models of mediated-deception as well as media richness theory and channel expansion theory. Two survey-based studies were conducted to look at this construct from the separate standpoints of the deceiver and the receiver. Study 1 (the deceiver) provided respondents with a detailed scenario and asked them to select a medium to use to accomplish a specific deceptive act. Results indicate a general preference for highly synchronous (and non-reprocessable) media. Study 2 (the receiver) focused each respondent on a specific medium and used 4 short scenarios to investigate how confidence in their ability to detect deception was affected by synchronicity, media richness, media familiarity, and co-participant (deceiver) familiarity. When making media selections, results indicate that synchronicity and media familiarity are relatively less important to receivers; instead, receivers engaged in deception detection clearly value rich media and co-participants with whom they have more experience and familiarity.

Computer-based monitoring: common perceptions and empirical results

Computer-based monitoring, the practice of collecting performance information on employees through the computers they use at work, continues to be a popular topic. How much is known about computer-based monitoring as it is practiced in the workplace? Unfortunately, very little, even though much has been written on the subject. This article reports on five case studies of organizations that employ computer-based monitoring to collect performance data on clerical workers. Although all five organizations utilize similar data collection methods and procedures, no two organizations use the data collected in the same ways to evaluate employee performance. Each site reports different levels of employee satisfaction with minitoring, different abilities of employees to balance demands for work quantity and quality, different levels of work-related illnesses, and different perceptions of supervision. Although these results do not appear surprising on the surface, much of the popular literature on computer- based monitoring stresses the negative effects of monitoring on workers, no matter how or where it is implemented. In this study, the simple presence of computer-based monitoring was not enough to explain differences between sites. Rather, other factors, such as which data were used for evaluation and outside economic pressures, helped to explain variations in monitoring and its effects across sites. Computer-based monitoring, like other information technologies, is a malleable technology.

Physical proximity effects on computer-mediated group idea generation

An experimental study measured the idea generation performance of groups offour and eight members in both proximate and distributed conditions using the same synchronous computer-mediated communication system. Proximate groups worked with all members in the same room. Distributed groups worked with all groups in separate, distributed offices. In terns of the total number of unique, total quality, and number of high-quality ideas generated, distributed groups outperformed proximate groups. A group size by proximity interaction was predicted to result in a higher rate of performance gainsfor increased group size within distributed groups, yet no interaction wasfound. The implications ofthese results for researchers and organizations contemplating the adoption of computermediated support technologies is discussed.