Peter Polak

Sharing knowledge

How managerial prompting, group identification, and social value orientation affect knowledge-sharing behavior.

When the Wait Isnt So Bad: The Interacting Effects of Website Delay, Familiarity, and Breadth

Although its popularity is widespread, the Web is well known for one particular drawback: its frequent delay when moving from one page to another. This experimental study examined whether delay and two other website design variables (site breadth and content familiarity) have interaction effects on user performance, attitudes, and behavioral intentions. The three experimental factors (delay, familiarity, and breadth) collectively impact the cognitive costs and penalties that users incur when making choices in their search for target information. An experiment was conducted with 160 undergraduate business majors in a completely counterbalanced, fully factorial design that exposed them to two websites and asked them to browse the sites for nine pieces of information. Results showed that all three factors have strong direct impacts on performance and user attitudes, in turn affecting behavioral intentions to return to the site, as might be expected. A significant three-way interaction was found between all three factors indicating that these factors not only individually impact a users experiences with a website, but also act in combination to either increase or decrease the costs a user incurs. Two separate analyses support an assertion that attitudes mediate the relationship of the three factors on behavioral intentions. The implications of these results for both researchers and practitioners are discussed. Additional research is needed to discover other factors that mitigate or accentuate the effects of delay, other effects of delay, and under what amounts of delay these effects occur.

What do systems users have to fear? using fear appeals to engender threats and fear that motivate protective security behaviors

Because violations of information security (ISec) and privacy have become ubiquitous in both personal and work environments, academic attention to ISec and privacy has taken on paramount importance. Consequently, a key focus of ISec research has been discovering ways to motivate individuals to engage in more secure behaviors. Over time, the protection motivation theory (PMT) has become a leading theoretical foundation used in ISec research to help motivate individuals to change their security-related behaviors to protect themselves and their organizations. Our careful review of the foundation for PMT identified four opportunities for improving ISec PMT research. First, extant ISec studies do not use the full nomology of PMT constructs. Second, only one study uses fear-appeal manipulations, even though these are a core element of PMT. Third, virtually no ISec study models or measures fear. Fourth, whereas these studies have made excellent progress in predicting security intentions, none of them have addressed actual security behaviors. This article describes the theoretical foundation of these four opportunities for improvement. We tested the nomology of PMT, including manipulated fear appeals, in two different ISec contexts that model the modern theoretical treatment of PMT more closely than do extant ISec studies. The first data collection was a longitudinal study in the context of data backups. The second study was a short-term cross-sectional study in the context of anti-malware software. Our new model demonstrated better results and stronger fit than the existing models and confirms the efficacy of the four potential improvements we identified.

An Experimental Study of Antecedents and Consequences of Online Ad Intrusiveness

Internet advertising has shown signs of continued healthy growth in spite of the burst Internet bubble. Several types of ads have been used, and there are important generic characteristics that can be gleaned from these ads: whether they obscure content and whether users have the control to remove them. These factors were tested in a laboratory study with 258 student participants. It was hypothesized that the factors would predict intrusiveness, which would predict perceived irritation. This, in turn, would predict attitudes about the site and, finally, intentions to return. Intrusiveness was also predicted to directly relate to recognition of the ads. All hypotheses were supported at high levels of statistical significance using analysis of variance and structural equation modeling. Explained variance was very high for intrusiveness (42%) and irritation (63%), but very low explained variance for ad recognition (11%) resulted in an alternative model that doubled explained variance by removing intrusiveness as a mediator between the factors and ad recognition. The interaction between user control and obscuring of the content behaved as hypothesized, and interaction charts illustrate the effects as predicted. Future studies should continue to focus on characteristics rather than on types of ads and generalize the results to other types of participants and settings.

Understanding user perspectives on biometric technology

Biometrics has been used for centuries to identify individuals by their own unique physical characteristics. Historically, the fingerprint has served as the most common method of identification. But other properties, which vary in their exactness and in users’ comfort, are also candidates for widespread usage. Today, an increasing number of biometric companies are offering new products to be considered for general deployment beyond security identification systems. Some application objectives for these products include: associating computer users with their computer behavior, linking employees to their workstation performance, managing user-resource usage and activity, and e-commerce. By far, these biometric products have been aimed mostly at providing authentication for an individual to gain access to sensitive information and resources. Biometric technologies are not without problems and come with their fair share of concerns. Some of these concerns are technical in nature, e.g., degradation of biometric features over time, variance in recorded and actual biometric characteristics, and threshold values for authentication. As the technology matures, however, the technical issues will be eventually overcome. On the other hand, many of the technology’s obstacles are based on attitudes and behaviors, related to user acceptance, trust, habits, etc., ultimately presenting a greater challenge for implementation. Previous research found that some of the issues include the domains of privacy, storage and safeguarding of personal identification information, fear of intrusion into an individual’s daily life, as well as concerns related to the relinquishing of personal information.

What leads us to share valuable knowledge? An experimental study of the effects of managerial control, group identification, and social value orientation on knowledge-sharing behavior

Knowledge management (KM) has become an important focus in todays information systems research and practice. An experiment investigated three factors that influence the behavior of individuals contributing their personally-held knowledge to a knowledge management system (KMS): managerial control, group identification, social value orientation, specifically when the individual sharer believes that the knowledge they are considering sharing has some potential value to them and others in their organization. Hypotheses suggested main and interaction effects of the three antecedents to sharing of valuable knowledge. Supported main effects included managerial control and social value orientation, and the 2-way interaction between social value orientation and managerial control was also supported. The hypothesized three-way interaction was supported. This research can expand understanding of the antecedents of knowledge sharing for both researchers and practitioners alike.

The Effect of Music Listening, Personality, and Prior Knowledge on Mood and Work Performance of Systems Analysts

This research examined the effect of music use, personality and prior knowledge on mood and work performance of 62 Systems Analysts. Although the quality of the data modeling task did not appear to be affected by the experimental treatment of 10 minutes of music listening, the level of extraversion, modeling proficiency, and theoretical knowledge related to modeling showed significant effects. Nevertheless, the effects of music were demonstrated on several mood measures. The effect of music on negative and positive affect, along with their subscales, are presented. Finally, changes in the mood of participants who listened to the music are examined in the light of various demographic and personality variables.

Online ad intrusiveness

In spite of the large extent and variety of on-line ads, their effects on users are largely unknown. Although the diversity of ads on the web is staggering, and new types spring up all the time, their properties can be abstracted to a relatively small number of important generic features. These characteristics include whether they obscure content and whether users have the control to remove them. These factors were tested in a laboratory study and results will be shared with participants at the conference.