Mark A. Fuller

Facilitator Influence in Group Support Systems: Intended and Unintended Effects

This paper addresses facilitation, a developing area of Group Support Systems (GSS) research. The facilitator role is one of improving a groups communication and information flow; facilitators are meant to enhance the manner in which a group makes decisions without making those decisions for the group. However, there is a paradox in facilitation: The influence required to facilitate a group changes the groups outcomes. Additionally, strict impartiality for facilitation may be too much to expect because facilitators may unintentionally bias group outcomes, or because facilitators may have their own agendas. Acknowledgment, training, and standards for facilitators may prove useful ways for groups to retain the benefits of facilitation without incurring the costs of inappropriate facilitator influence. Implications are drawn for new research acknowledging the complexity of the GSS sociotechnical system, and the importance of sociotechnical facilitation in organizations.

Research standards for promotion and tenure in information systems

What constitutes excellence in information systems research for promotion and tenure? This is a question that is regularly addressed by members of promotion and tenure committees and those called upon to write external letters. While there are many elements to this question, one major element is the quality and quantity of an individuals research publications. An informal survey of senior Information Systems faculty members at 49 leading U.S. and Canadian universities found 86 percent to expect three or more articles in elite journals. In contrast, an analysis of publication performance of Ph.D. graduates between the years of 1992 and 2004 found that approximately three individuals in each graduating year of Ph.D.s (about 2 percent) published 3 or more articles in a set of 20 elite journals within 6 years of graduation. Only 15 individuals from each graduating year (11 percent) published one or more articles. As a discipline, we publish elite journal articles at a lower rate than Accounting, yet our promotion and tenure standards are higher, similar to those of Management, Marketing, and Finance. Thus, there is a growing divergence between research performance and research standards within the Information Systems discipline. As such, unless we make major changes, these differences will perpetuate a vicious cycle of increasing faculty turnover, declining influence on university affairs, and lower research productivity. We believe that we must act now to create a new future, and offer recommendations that focus on the use of more appropriate standards for promotion and tenure and ways to increase the number of articles published.

Improving student learning of conceptual information: GSS supported collaborative learning vs. individual constructive learning

Abstract A great deal of time in the traditional classroom environment is spent gathering information (taking notes) rather than processing the information and assimilating the information. The traditional learning model goes from the gathering to recall stage without regard for whether the information is actually comprehended (processed and assimilated). The research reported in this paper employed a quasi-experimental design to examine whether technology-enabled collaborative learning involving case analyses is superior to individual constructive learning involving individual case analyses where the goal of both methods is to increase student interest in the course, increase student understanding of the material, and enhance student performance. The study found that students working collaboratively in either small or large groups were more interested in the material and perceived themselves to learn more than students that worked individually but that students that worked individually outperformed students that collaborated in small or large groups before working individually.

Efficacy in Technology-Mediated Distributed Teams

The concept of collective efficacy within virtual teams has yet to be studied. This study developed and rigorously validated a domain-specific measure of collective efficacy, entitled virtual team efficacy, within a comprehensive research framework. Over a two-year period we collected field study data from multiple samples of information systems project teams—in all, 52 virtual teams comprising 318 students from the United States, Great Britain, and Hong Kong. As we hypothesized, group potency and computer collective efficacy act as antecedents to virtual team efficacy, and virtual team efficacy is in turn predictive of perceptual and objective measures of performance. Further, consistent with efficacy theory, we also find that virtual team efficacy acts on performance outcomes through specific mediating processes. This paper contributes to the academic and practitioner communities by providing a comprehensive model of virtual team efficacy and performance and by providing validated instrumentation that can be immediately applied during further research in this area.

Involvement and Decision-Making Performance with a Decision Aid: The Influence of Social Multimedia, Gender, and Playfulness

This research explores how multimedia vividness and the use of computer-based social cues can influence involvement with technology and decision-making outcomes. An experiment is conducted that examines the effect that increased levels of vividness (text, voice, and animation) and decision aid personality have on decision-making involvement. In addition, the influence of two individual differences, gender and computer playfulness, on decision aid involvement are investigated. The cost-benefit framework of decision making and related research on consumer information processing provide the theoretical foundation for the study and suggest how increased involvement may influence decision making. Several decision-making outcomes are measured, including decision effort, decision quality, satisfaction with the decision aid, and understanding of the decision aid. Findings indicate that personality similarity (between the user and the decision aid) and computer playfulness result in increased involvement with the decision aid. In addition, women report higher levels of involvement with the decision aid. Increased levels of multimedia vividness are found to have a contradictory effect, with animation actually reducing involvement with the decision aid. The findings are discussed in terms of theoretical contributions and practical interface design implications.

I Know I Can, But Can We? Culture and Efficacy Beliefs in Global Virtual Teams

Given the growing use of global virtual teams, one important factor to consider when examining team performance is the cultural backgrounds of the dispersed team members. Two hundred forty-three team members from universities in the United States and Hong Kong were administered three survey questionnaires during a series of virtual team projects. Results revealed that regardless of cultural background, team members reported less confidence in their ability to work in virtual team environments than traditional face-to-face environments and that team members from individualistic cultures reported higher self-efficacy beliefs (both group self-efficacy and virtual team self-efficacy) than team members from collectivist cultures. Furthermore, when the reference for efficacy beliefs changed from the individual to the group, the magnitude of change was greater for the collectivist versus individualistic team members. Implications and future research are also discussed.

Clarifying the Integration of Trust and TAM in E-Commerce Environments: Implications for Systems Design and Management

Two dominant theories-trust and technology acceptance-have been employed in numerous information systems research studies to help understand consumer behavior in e-commerce environments. In this context of voluntary Web site adoption and use, we provide a more precise understanding of the nomological network related to the cognitive variables (both beliefs and attitudes) that precede this use. Designers and engineers need to be concerned not just with building an objectively better Web site but also with building a Web site that conveys desirable characteristics. Although the theory of reasoned action has been acknowledged as the underlying theory for technology acceptance and some trust research, past studies integrating these two theories have omitted important variables from their models and have posited different causal relationships among model variables. This research argues for the reinclusion and/or clarification of belief and attitude constructs relevant to technology acceptance and trust research streams, explains why these constructs are critical for understanding causality in such models, proposes an integration model that is consistent with this argument, and finally tests this model in a context exploring initial reactions to an e-vendor and evaluates the relative importance of trust and technology acceptance variables in predicting user intentions.

Seeing Is Believing: The Transitory Influence of Reputation Information on E-Commerce Trust and Decision Making

This research examines the transitory influence of reputation information on consumer decision making regarding an e-vendor. Using social judgment theory to explain how reputation informations effect on perceptions may be fleeting, we specifically examined how user trusting beliefs related to an e-vendor change after a simple exposure to the Web site. A total of 369 college students participated in an experiment that found that reputation information was initially strongly related to trusting beliefs regarding the e-vendor, but a brief nonpurchase-related exposure to the e-vendors Web site—that is, direct experience—reduced reputations effects significantly. This research provides insights into why reputation information may be more important in certain circumstances than in others and enhances our understanding of how consumer decision making is affected by different purchasing contexts. This research also has implications on the design and use of trust-building technologies.

Applying TAM to e-services adoption: the moderating role of perceived risk

Consumer adoption of e-services is an important goal for many service providers, however little is known about how different consumer segments perceive and evaluate them for adoption. The technology acceptance model (TAM) explains information systems evaluation and adoption, however the Internet-delivered e-services context presents additional variance that requires supplemental measures to be added to TAM. This research extends TAM to include a perceived usage risk main effect and also tested whether perceived risk moderated several of TAMs relationships. Results indicate that higher levels of perceived risk deflated ease of users effect and inflated subjective norms effect on perceived usefulness and adoption intention.

Trustworthiness in B2C e-commerce: an examination of alternative models

Advancing research on trust requires clarifying the different conceptualizations of trust and trust-related constructs. The purpose of this study is to advance the theoretical conceptualization of trustworthiness by synthesizing previous research and testing three alternative conceptualizations within the e-commerce context. Data collected from multiple studies involving over 700 participants were used to examine the relative merits of trustworthiness as a one-dimensional construct, a grouping of three first-order constructs, and a second-order construct. Our results indicate that a one-dimensional view may be too simplistic, given the variety of factors that online consumers must weigh. Instead, the study suggests that trustworthiness is multidimensional and that both first- and second-order conceptualizations have a place in e-commerce trust research. Trust researchers should be guided by the research question, hypotheses, and research design in deciding which conceptualization to use.