33. Guo, F., Li, Y., Maruping, L.M., and Masli, A. Complementarity between investment in information technology (IT) and IT human resources: Implications for different types of firm innovation. Information Systems Research, Forthcoming.
It is well acknowledged in the information systems (IS) literature that information technology (IT) plays an important role in firm innovation. A small but growing body of empirical evidence points to the importance of IT employees as an important complementary resource, particularly for IT-related innovation. However, there is an open question as to whether investment in such resources is complementary across a range of innovation types. This research note aims to provide theoretical and empirical clarity by emphasizing the complementary nature of firm investment in IT and in IT human resources (HR) in affecting firm innovation performance across four types of innovation: incremental, radical, non-IT-related and IT-related. Drawing upon the theory of complementarities as well as theorizing about the operand and operant nature of resources, we argue that firm investment in IT HR enables firms to gain additional innovation value from their IT investments and vice versa. Using a sample involving 36,812 firm-year observations, we find that firms with robust investments in IT and in IT human resources produce more patents with greater value. Further, we find that such firms produce more patents that emphasize new knowledge as well as those that build on existing knowledge. Finally, we find that this complementarity promotes IT-related and non-IT related innovation. A series of analyses demonstrate the robustness of these results. We discuss implications for theory and practice.
32. Venkatesh, V., Weng, Q., Rai, A., and Maruping, L.M. Guidelines for the development of three-level models: Bridging levels of analysis and integrating contextual influences in IS research. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Forthcoming.
The use of multilevel analysis has steadily increased in information systems (IS) research. Many studies are doing an admirable job of integrating two-level models into their examination of IS phenomena. However, two-level models are limited in how well they enable researchers to (1) more explicitly incorporate context into theory development and testing and (2) bridge the existing gap between micro- and macro-level research by focusing on intervening mechanisms that link hierarchically distal levels of analysis. Three-level models have emerged as a potential way to address these limitations. While literature has clearly outlined the mechanics of how to estimate three-level models, there is very little, if any, guidance on when and how to integrate the use of such models with theory development. Consequently, IS researchers have little guidance to inform their decisions about integrating the use of three-level models with their theory development and testing. In this article, we identify the circumstances under which IS researchers should consider the use of three-level models, develop guidelines about how to map the use of three-level model estimation to the theoretical objectives, and provide an illustration of how to implement the guidelines.
31. Lin, Y-K., and Maruping, L.M. (2022). Open source collaboration in digital entrepreneurship. Organization Science, 33(1) 212-230.
Emerging digital technologies give rise to digital entrepreneurship and the widespread phenomenon of open source collaboration (OSC) on GitHub for entrepreneurial pursuits. Although openness is a common theme in digital entrepreneurship, it is unclear how digital startups—that is, startups that that have digital artifacts at the core of their business model for value creation and capture—actually realize value from their OSC engagement. We develop a theoretical framework to explain how the engagement in OSC may affect the value of digital startups and how the effect is contingent on the stage of venture maturity (conception, commercialization, or growth) and the mode of OSC engagement (inbound or outbound). In analyses that pool 17,552 matched digital startups with monthly panel observations between 2008 and 2017, we find digital startups in the conception and commercialization stages benefit more from inbound OSC whereas the ones in the growth stage benefit more from outbound OSC. As digital startups increasingly use OSC for ideation, experimentation, and scaling, our contribution is to show whether, when, and how knowledge flows through OSC might affect the value of digital startups. We discuss implications for research on organizing for digital entrepreneurship as well as open innovation.
30. Maruping, L.M. Rai, A., Aljafari, R., and Venkatesh, V. (2021). Overcoming cross-organizational barriers to success in offshore projects. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 121(12) 2365-2363.
29. Baird, A., and Maruping, L.M. (2021). The next generation of research on IS use: A theoretical framework of delegation to and from agentic IS artifacts. MIS Quarterly, 45(1) 315-341.
Information systems (IS) use, the dominant theoretical paradigm for explaining how users apply IS artifacts toward goal attainment, gives primacy to human agency in the user–IS artifact relationship. Models and theorizing in the IS use research stream tend to treat the IS artifact as a passive tool; lacking in the ability to initiate action and accept rights and responsibilities for achieving optimal outcomes under uncertainty. We argue that a new generation of “agentic” IS artifacts requires revisiting the human agency primacy assumption. Agentic IS artifacts are no longer passive tools waiting to be used, are no longer always subordinate to the human agent, and can now assume responsibility for tasks with ambiguous requirements and for seeking optimal outcomes under uncertainty. To move our theorizing forward, we introduce delegation, based on agent interaction theories, as a foundational and powerful lens through which to understand and explain the human–agentic IS artifact relationship. While delegation has always been central to human–IS artifact interactions, it has yet to be explicitly recognized in IS use theorizing. We explicitly theorize IS delegation by developing an IS delegation theoretical framework. This framework provides a scaffolding which can guide future IS delegation theorizing and focuses on the human–agentic IS artifact dyad as the elemental unit of analysis. The framework specifically reveals the importance of agent attributes relevant to delegation (endowments, preferences, and roles) as well as foundational mechanisms of delegation (appraisal, distribution, and coordination). Guidelines are proposed to demonstrate how this theoretical framework can be applied toward generation of testable models. We conclude by outlining a roadmap for mobilizing future research.
28. Maruping, L. M., and Matook, S. (2020). The evolution of software development orchestration: Current state and an agenda for future research. European Journal of Information Systems, 29(5) 1411-1437.
27. Maruping, L. M., and Matook, S. (2020). The multiplex nature of the customer representative role in agile information systems development. MIS Quarterly, 44(3) 1411-1437.
It is well acknowledged that close collaboration with the customer serves as the lynchpin to ensuring that agile information systems development (ISD) teams produce the right software within mutually agreed targets. In several agile ISD methods, this emphasis on close collaboration is enacted through the role of a designated customer representative (CR). The agile ISD literature has recognized the behaviors in this role to be inherently complementary and contradicting in nature, presenting a challenge to whoever occupies the role and hampering their ability to add value to the project. How do CRs manage these challenges and why do they do so in a particular manner? Unfortunately, there has been little theory to answer these questions. In this research, we augment understanding of this phenomenon by leveraging role multiplexity as a role-theoretic lens in making sense of the behavior of CRs in agile ISD. Results suggest that the CR role is multiplex, exhibiting multiple manifestations with different orientations. We develop a theoretical model that articulates the instantiation of these role manifestations and the mechanisms that enable the CR role to remain intact while managing these challenges. The theoretical model highlights the CR role in agile ISD as being dynamic and multi-oriented.
26. Maruping, L. M., Daniel, S. L., and Cataldo, M. (2019). Developer centrality and the impact of value congruence and incongruence on commitment and code contribution activity in open source software communities. MIS Quarterly, 43(3) 951-976.
Open source software (OSS) communities enjoy success that comes from the code contributions of developers who, in many cases, never meet face-to-face and collaborate primarily through technology-enabled means. With their fluid membership, such communities often rely on engaging the commitment of developers to their cause. Given the changing nature of OSS communities, developers face barriers in appreciating appropriate ways of contributing to the collaborative effort. Such uncertainty about how to contribute results in OSS communities losing developers as they devote their attention to other more welcoming communities. In this research, we draw upon uncertainty reduction theory to argue that developers have two alternative avenues at their disposal to gain certainty about how to contribute: passive and interactive. Leveraging the person-environment fit perspective, we argue that congruence and incongruence in the OSS values of the developer and an OSS community serves as an avenue for passive approaches to gaining certainty; to the degree that appropriate ways of contributing are encoded in these values. Further, leveraging social network theory, we argue that centrality within a community’s communication network constitutes an avenue for interactive approaches for gaining certainty about how to contribute. Using polynomial regression analysis, we analyze survey and archival data from 410 developers in an OSS community. Results suggest that developer centrality moderates the impact of congruence and incongruence in OSS values on commitment. Moreover, commitment fully mediates the impact of OSS value congruence and incongruence on developer contribution activity. We discuss the implications of our findings for research and practice.
25. Magni, M., and Maruping, L. M. (2019). Unleashing innovation with collaboration platforms. MIT Sloan Management Review, 60(3) 23-27.
Digital collaboration platforms provide innovation opportunities for diverse and distributed teams.
24. Maruping, L. M., Venkatesh, V., Zhang, X., and Thong, J. Y. L. (2019). A risk mitigation framework for information technology projects: A cultural contingency perspective. Journal of Management Information Systems, 36(1) 120-157.
As new information technology (IT) platforms continue to emerge, the technical project risk associated with developing IT projects for these platforms is particularly challenging for organizations. We develop a nomological network of people, process, and technology to gain insight into how the effect of technical project risk can be mitigated at the IT project team level. Drawing on cultural contingency theory, the IT project risk framework, and the IT project management literature, we elaborate on the IT project team composition and team processes necessary to mitigate technical project risk. We tested the nomological network by conducting a field study of 325 IT project teams over a 3-year period at a large corporation in China. We found that project risk mitigation processes mediated the effect of IT project teams’ cultural composition on IT project performance, and the effect of these processes on IT project performance was stronger under high levels of technical project risk compared to low levels of such risk. By incorporating the cultural contingency theory into developing a nomological network of technical risk mitigation processes, this work not only contributes to the IT project management literature, but also provides suggestions for practitioners on how to better leverage people, process, and technology in mitigating IT project risks.
23. Raghuram, S., Hill, N. S., Gibbs, J., and Maruping, L. M. (2019). Virtual work: Bridging research clusters. Academy of Management Annals, 13(1) 308-341.
Virtual work is becoming the new normal, with employees working from dispersed locations and interacting using computer-mediated communication. Despite the growth in virtual work research, it has tended to occur in siloes focused on different types of virtual work (e.g., virtual teams, telecommuting) that are grounded in different research traditions. This limits opportunities to leverage research across these different domains. We use a co-citation analysis to examine the degree of segmentation in the field of virtual work into disparate research clusters. We find the emergence of three major research clusters: telecommuting, virtual teams, and computer-mediated work. Motivated by this finding, we carry out a comparative review of the literature in each cluster with the objective of seeking ways to exploit opportunities that cut across them. Based on our review, we first develop a conceptual model using the dispersion and technology dependence dimensions of virtuality to compare different approaches to studying virtuality-related issues across clusters. Next, we use our comparative review to propose a systematic approach for developing research questions that bridge research across the clusters by considering how different approaches to studying virtuality and the ensuing problem domains addressed in one cluster might help to advance research in another. To illustrate this approach, we discuss 12 research questions for bridging across the three virtual work clusters. Finally, we discuss the research implications of our conceptual model and bridging approach. Our review and conceptual model along with proposed bridging approach help to facilitate a forward-looking agenda for accelerating and enriching virtual work research.
22. Magni, M., Ahuja, M. K., and Maruping, L. M. (2018). Distant but fair: Intrateam justice climate and performance in dispersed teams. Journal of Management Information Systems, 35(4) 1031-1059.
Organizations are increasingly attempting to take advantage of distributed knowledge by counting on teams that rely on ICT to manage their interactions (i.e. dispersed teams). Team context has often been touted as an important factor in affecting performance in dispersed team settings. Recent research has called for the consideration of intra-team justice climate in dispersed teams, yet how it shapes team performance at different degrees of dispersion remains unresolved. Drawing on and integrating extant justice climate and IS literature on team dispersion, we develop a model to better understand the precise nature of the role played by intra-team procedural justice climate in the relationship between team member dispersion and team performance. Responses from 468 team members and supervisors belonging to 101 work teams were used to test the research model. We found that team dispersion and procedural justice climate affect team performance, and that procedural justice alleviates the negative effect of dispersion on performance, indicating that intra-team procedural justice climate can be a lever for mitigating the challenges posed by ICT-based interaction among members. These findings make important contributions to the extant IS literature on dispersed teams by outlining how organizations may mitigate some of the challenges of dispersion and improve team performance by creating an intra-team environment based upon fairness.
21. Daniel, S. L., Maruping, L. M., Cataldo, M., and Herbsleb, J. (2018). The impact of ideology misfit on open source software (OSS) communities and companies. MIS Quarterly, 42(4) 1069-1096.
Corporate involvement in open source software (OSS) communities has increased substantially in recent years. Often this takes the form of company employees devoting their time to contribute code to these communities’ efforts. Ideology has traditionally served to motivate, coordinate and guide volunteer contributions to OSS communities. As employees represent an increasing proportion of the participants in OSS communities, the role of OSS ideology in guiding their commitment and code contributions is unknown. In this research, we argue that OSS ideology misfit has important implications for companies and the OSS communities to which their employees contribute, since their engagement in such communities is not necessarily voluntary. We conceptualize two different types of misfit: OSS ideology under-fit—whereby an employee embraces an OSS ideology more than their coworkers or OSS community does, and OSS ideology over-fit—whereby an employee perceives that their coworkers or OSS community embrace the OSS ideology more strongly than the employee does. To develop a set of hypotheses about the implications of these two types of misfit for employee commitment to the company and commitment to the OSS community, we draw on self-determination theory. We test the hypotheses in a field study of 186 employees who participate in an OSS community. We find that OSS ideology under-fit impacts the company and the community in the same way; it decreases employee commitment to the company and commitment to the OSS community. In contrast, we find that OSS ideology over-fit increases commitment to the company but decreases commitment to the OSS community. Finally, we find that employees’ commitment to their company reinforces the impact of their commitment to the OSS community in driving ongoing code contributions. This provides a holistic view of OSS ideology and its impacts among an increasingly pervasive yet understudied type of participant in OSS research. It provides insights for companies that are considering assigning their employees to work in OSS communities as well as for OSS communities that are partnering with these companies.
20. Venkatesh, V., Rai, A., and Maruping, L. M. (2018). Information systems projects and individual developer outcomes: Role of project managers and process control. Information Systems Research, 29(1) 127-148.
We integrate control theory and the information systems (IS) project management literature using a multilevel lens to theorize the cross-level effects of technical IS project risk on individual developer outcomes—performance and psychological stress—and the mechanisms by which IS project managers’ project-related knowledge attenuates this relationship. We argue that IS project managers with project-related knowledge mitigate technical IS project risk by facilitating the enactment of internal and external process controls in their IS projects. Our empirical study involves data collected from 1,230 individual developers embedded in 130 IS project teams that are managed by 20 IS project managers. Our results provide strong support for the three-level model and its set of (a) cross-level main effects of technical IS project risk on individual developer outcomes, (b) cross-level main effects of IS project manager project-related knowledge on enacted internal and external process controls, and (c) cross-level moderation of the relationship between technical IS project risk and individual developer outcomes by IS project manager project-related knowledge through internal and external process controls. Our study provides insights on how IS project management, IS project process controls, and technical IS project risk must be managed as a system of multilevel dependencies to achieve the desired developer outcomes.
19. Windeler, J. B., Maruping, L. M., and Venkatesh, V. (2017). Systems development risk factors: The role of empowering leadership in lowering developers’ stress. Information Systems Research, 28(4) 775-796.
The success of information systems development (ISD) projects depends on the developers who deliver them. However, developers face many challenges in bringing an ISD project to successful completion. These projects are often large, highly complex, with volatile targets, creating a stressful environment for developers. Although prior literature has considered how technical ISD risk factors, such as project size, complexity and target volatility, impact team- and project-level outcomes, their impact on developers has received limited attention. This gap in the literature is problematic for two reasons: (1) the interplay between individuals and project characteristics are unaccounted for, resulting in an incomplete picture of ISD; and (2) individual-level stress has been shown to reduce team performance. In this research, we examine the role of empowering leadership in reducing developer stress in ISD. We develop a multilevel model of the influence of empowering leadership on the relationship between technical ISD risk factors and developers’ role perceptions and explore the consequences for developers’ stress. The model was tested in a field study of 350 developers in 73 ISD teams from a large U.S.-based firm. Results showed that empowering leadership ameliorated the negative effects of project size and target volatility on role ambiguity, as well as the negative effects of project size, complexity, and target volatility on role conflict and stress. We also found that empowering leadership reduced role ambiguity, role conflict, and stress directly, and that role ambiguity and role conflict increased stress. Project size, complexity, and target volatility were found to increase empowering leadership behaviors. We conclude that empowering leadership can be an effective means of helping developers cope with technical ISD risk factors and discuss the implications of our findings for research and practice.
18. Maruping, L. M., Bala, H., Venkatesh, V., and Brown, S. A. (2017). Going beyond intention: Integrating behavioral expectation into the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 68(3) 623-637.
Research on information technology (IT) adoption and use, one of the most mature streams of research in the information science and information systems literature, is primarily based on the intentionality framework. Behavioral intention (BI) to use an IT is considered the sole proximal determinant of IT adoption and use. Recently, researchers have discussed the limitations of BI and argued that behavioral expectation (BE) would be a better predictor of IT use. However, without a theoretical and empirical understanding of the determinants of BE, we remain limited in our comprehension of what factors promote greater IT use in organizations. Using the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology as the theoretical framework, we develop a model that posits 2 determinants (i.e., social influence and facilitating conditions) of BE and 4 moderators (i.e., gender, age, experience, and voluntariness of use) of the relationship between BE and its determinants. We argue that the cognitions underlying the formation of BI and BE differ. We found strong support for the proposed model in a longitudinal field study of 321 users of a new IT.
17. Maruping, L. M., Venkatesh, V., Thatcher, S. M. B. and Patel, P. C. (2015). Folding under pressure or rising to the occasion? Perceived time pressure and the moderating role of team temporal leadership. Academy of Management Journal, 58(5) 1313-1333.
“Team temporal leadership” orients teams toward managing the time-related aspects of their work. We examine how perceived time pressure affects team processes and subsequent performance under weak versus strong team temporal leadership. The results of our field study of 111 project teams show that the mediated relationship between perceived time pressure and team performance is non-linear. Moreover, this non-linear mediated relationship is moderated by team temporal leadership such that,under strong team temporal leadership, the indirect effect of perceived time pressure on team performance is mostly positive, while, under conditions of weak team temporal leadership, the indirect effect is positive at low levels of perceived time pressure and negative at intermediate to high levels. Implications for current and future time pressure research are also discussed.
16. Windeler, J. B., Maruping, L. M., Robert Jr., L. P., and Riemenschneider, C. (2015). E-profiles, conflict, and shared understanding in distributed teams. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 16(7) 608-645.
In this research, we examine the efficacy of a technological intervention in shaping distributed team members’ perceptions about their teammates. We argue that, by exposing distributed team members to electronic profiles (e-profiles) with information emphasizing their personal similarities with one another, distributed teams should experience lower levels of relational and task conflict. In turn, reductions in conflict should facilitate a shared understanding among team members, which should increase their team effectiveness. The results of a laboratory experiment of 46 distributed teams generally support these assertions. Specifically, we found that a simple, technological intervention can reduce task conflict in distributed teams, which, in turn, improves shared understanding and team effectiveness. We also uncovered important differences in the antecedents and impacts of relational and task conflict. Although we found that the e-profile intervention was effective in accounting for variance in task conflict (R2 = .41), it was quite poor in accounting for variance in relational conflict (R2 = .04). The model accounts for 33% and 43% of the variance in shared understanding and team effectiveness, respectively. Taken together, the results of this research suggest that the information shared about team members in distributed team settings has important implications for their ability to collaborate, achieve a common understanding of their work, and accomplish their task effectively. We suggest that e-profiles may be a useful intervention for management to enhance effectiveness in distributed teams.
15. Maruping, L. M., and Magni, M. (2015). Motivating employees to explore and use collaboration technology in team contexts. MIS Quarterly, 39(1) 1-16. (Lead research article)
Firms are increasing their investments in collaboration technologies in order to leverage the intellectual resources embedded in their employees. Research on post-adoption use of technology suggests that the true gains from such investments are realized when users explore various system features and attempt to incorporate them into their work practices. However, the literature has been silent about how to promote such behavior when individuals are embedded in team settings, where members’ actions are interdependent. This research develops a multilevel model that theorizes the cross-level influence of team empowerment on individual exploration of collaboration technology. Further, it identifies two cognitions—intention to continue exploring and expectation to continue exploring—that are oriented toward exploring ways to incorporate implemented technology into daily work routines over time. A 12-month field study of 212 employees in 48 organizational work teams was conducted to test the multilevel research model. The results provide support for the hypotheses, with team empowerment having a positive cross-level influence on intention to continue exploring and expectation to continue exploring and these, in turn, mediating the cross-level influence of team empowerment on individual exploration of collaboration technology.
14. Matook, S., and Maruping, L. M. (2014). A competency model for customer representatives in agile software development projects. MIS Quarterly Executive, 13(2) 77-95.
In an agile software development project, customer representatives (CRs) have explicit and implicit responsibilities that facilitate the creation of software to meet evolving customer needs in a timely manner. We describe a competency model for effective CRs that was developed following interviews with four agile development teams. The model comprises 10 competencies grouped within three competency areas: Business, Socio-Relational and Systems. We provide recommendations for CIOs on how to use the model as a tool for communication, education and training, performance assessment and diagnostics.
13. Magni, M., and Maruping, L. M. (2013). Sink or swim: Empowering leadership and overload in teams’ ability to deal with the unexpected. Human Resource Management, 52(5) 715-739.
The notion of improvisation has recently emerged in managerial studies as a viable solution to flexibly dealing with unexpected occurrences in work environments. However, past research on team improvisation has overlooked the contingencies that allow teams to effectively improvise. Drawing upon demand-control theory, we investigate how empowering leadership and overload affect the improvisation-performance relationship in the context of 48 work teams. Our results suggest that empowering leadership positively moderates the relationship between improvisation and performance, while overload attenuates the same relationship. Moreover, we found a joint effect of overload and empowering leadership influencing the improvisation performance link, such that improvisation is most positively related to performance when empowering leadership is high and overload is low. Conversely, we found that empowering leadership is particularly detrimental to the improvisation-performance relationship when team members perceive high degrees of overload. Our findings make important contributions to the extant team literature as well as to the emerging literature on team improvisation. We outline several significant insights for HR managers and team leaders who are responsible for supporting teams that face unexpected events in the work environment. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
12. Magni, M., Maruping, L. M., Hoegl, M., and Proserpio, L. (2013). Managing the unexpected across space: Improvisation, dispersion and performance in NPD teams. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 30(5) 1009-1026.
Organizations are increasingly moving toward a team-based structure for managing complex knowledge in new product development (NPD) projects. Such teams operate in an environment characterized by dynamic project requirements and emergent nonroutine issues, which can undermine their ability to achieve project objectives. Team improvisation—a collective, spontaneous, and creative action for identifying novel solutions to emergent problems—has been identified as a key team-situated response to unexpected challenges to NPD team effectiveness. Geographic dispersion is increasingly becoming a reality for NPD teams that find themselves needing to improvise solutions to emergent challenges while attempting to leverage the knowledge of team members who are physically distributed across various locations. However, very little is known about how teams’ improvisational actions affect performance when such actions are executed in increasingly dispersed teams. To address this gap in the literature, this paper draws on the emerging literature on different forms and degrees of team dispersion to understand how team improvisation affects team performance in such teams. In particular this paper takes into account both the structural and psychological facets of dispersion by considering the physical distance between team members, the configuration of the team across different sites, as well as the team members’ perception of being distant from their teammates. Responses from 299 team leaders and team members of 71 NPD projects in the software industry were used to analyze the relationship between team improvisation and team performance, as well as the moderating effect of the three different conceptualizations of team dispersion. Results of the study indicate that team improvisation has a positive influence on project team performance by allowing team members to respond to unexpected challenges through creative and timely action. However, increasing degrees of team member dispersion (both structural and psychological) attenuate this relationship by making it difficult to have timely access to other team members’ knowledge and by limiting real-time interactions that may lead to the development of creative solutions. The results of this research offer guidance to managers about when to balance the desire to leverage expertise to cope with unexpected events. Moreover, the present paper provides directions for future research on improvisation and team dispersion. Future research is encouraged to investigate factors that may help highly dispersed teams to overcome the shortcomings of team dispersion in dealing with emergent events.
11. Maruping, L. M., and Magni, M. (2012). What’s the weather like? The effect of team learning climate, empowerment climate, and gender on individuals’ technology exploration and use. Journal of Management Information Systems, 29(1) 79-113.
Given the pervasive use of teams in organizations coupled with high levels of investment in collaboration technology, there is increasing interest in identifying factors that affect the exploration and use of a broader scope of system features so that firms can benefit from the use of such technology. Prior research has called for a deeper understanding of how managers can encourage greater innovation with technology in the workplace. Drawing on the team climate and technology use literature, we identify team learning climate and team empowerment climate as key factors that affect employees’ propensity to explore a new system’s features. We develop and test our multilevel model on team climate, team technology exploration, and team technology use in a field study involving 268 employees embedded in 56 work teams. Three main findings come out of this research. First, the results reveal that the two types of team climate differ in their cross-level effects on individual intention to explore, such that team learning climate promotes greater intention to explore, whereas team empowerment climate reduces employees’ intention to explore the technology. In addition, we find that team learning climate and team empowerment climate interact in shaping individual intention to explore, such that the presence of a strong learning climate is more effective in promoting intention to explore when teams also have a strong empowerment climate. Second, the findings show that men and women are affected differently by team climate. We find that for men, team empowerment climate has no influence on intention to explore, whereas for women there is significant negative cross-level effect. Finally, we find that intention to explore has a positive effect on usage scope, suggesting an important link between team climate, individual cognition, and the scope of features used by employees in team settings. Taken together, the model and results highlight the important role of team climate and gender—and the interplay between them—as drivers of technology feature exploration. Our findings, especially those related to team empowerment climate, are counter intuitive when compared to prior literature and offer useful insights for managers. On the one hand, managers should consider leveraging team learning climate to intrinsically stimulate employees to engage in exploration of technology. On the other hand, managers should be cautious and guard against saddling employees with too many additional responsibilities during the stages of exploration and experimentation with system features. It is possible that through an expanded set of responsibilities and expectations fostered by team empowerment climate, employees may be experiencing work overload, thus reducing their likelihood of exploring a broader set of technology features. Managers should be especially attentive to this based on the gender composition of their teams.
10. Alnuaimi, O., Robert Jr, L. P., and Maruping, L. M. (2010). Team size, dispersion, and social loafing in technology-supported teams: A theory of moral disengagement perspective. Journal of Management Information Systems, 27(1) 203-230.
Social loafing is the tendency of individuals to withhold contributions to a task in a team setting. Team size and dispersion are two primary drivers of social loafing in technology-supported team settings. However, the mechanisms through which these drivers affect social loafing are not well understood. Consequently, the objective of this study is to identify the cognitive mechanisms that mediate the effect of team size and dispersion on social loafing in technology-supported teams. Drawing on the theory of moral disengagement, we posit that three primary cognitive mechanisms—diffusion of responsibility, attribution of blame, and dehumanization—will mediate the effect of team size and dispersion on social loafing. We conducted a laboratory study involving 140 students randomly assigned to 32 teams performing a brainstorming task using group systems software. The results show that diffusion of responsibility, attribution of blame, and dehumanization all mediate (partially) the effects of team size on social loafing. Meanwhile, only dehumanization mediates (fully) the effect of dispersion on social loafing.
9. Maruping, L. M., Venkatesh, V., and Agarwal, R. (2009). A control theory perspective on agile methodology use and changing user requirements. Information Systems Research, 20(3) 377-399.
In this paper, we draw on control theory to understand the conditions under which the use of agile practices is most effective in improving software project quality. Although agile development methodologies offer the potential of improving software development outcomes, limited research has examined how project managers can structure the software development environment to maximize the benefits of agile methodology use during a project. As a result, project managers have little guidance on how to manage teams who are using agile methodologies. Arguing that the most effective control modes are those that provide teams with autonomy in determining the methods for achieving project objectives, we propose hypotheses related to the interaction between control modes, agile methodology use, and requirements change. We test the model in a field study of 862 software developers in 110 teams. The model explains substantial variance in four objective measures of project quality—bug severity, component complexity, coordinative complexity, and dynamic complexity. Results largely support our hypotheses, highlighting the interplay between project control, agile methodology use, and requirements change. The findings contribute to extant literature by integrating control theory into the growing literature on agile methodology use and by identifying specific contingencies affecting the efficacy of different control modes. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our results.
8. Rai, A., Maruping, L. M., and Venkatesh, V. (2009). Offshore information systems project success: The role of social embeddedness and cultural characteristics. MIS Quarterly, 33(3) 617-641.
Agency theory has served as a key basis for identifying drivers of offshore information system project success. Consequently, the role of relational factors in driving project success has been overlooked in this literature. In this paper, we address this gap by integrating the social embeddedness perspective and the culture literature to theorize how and why relational factors affect the success of offshore IS projects that are strategic in nature. We identify organizational and interpersonal cultural differences as critical success factors in this context. Using data from a longitudinal field study of 155 offshore IS projects managed by 22 project leaders, we found evidence of a relationship between hypothesized relational factors and two measures of offshore IS project success—namely, project cost overruns and client satisfaction— over and above the effects of project characteristics and agency factors. Specifically, we found that information exchange, joint problem solving, and trust reduce project cost overruns and improve client satisfaction. We also found a relationship between cultural differences at the organizational and team level, and offshore IS project success. The model explained 40 percent and 41 percent of the variance in project cost overruns and client satisfaction, respectively, for projects with a client representative. For projects with no client representative, the model explained 35 percent and 37 percent of the variance in project cost overruns and client satisfaction, respectively. Collectively, the results have important theoretical and practical implications for how client– vendor relationships should be managed when partnering with offshore firms and designing offshore IS project teams.
7. Maruping, L. M., Zhang, X., and Venkatesh, V. (2009). Role of collective ownership and coding standards in coordinating expertise in software project teams. European Journal of Information Systems, 18(4) 355-371.
Software development is a complex undertaking that continues to present software project teams with numerous challenges. Software project teams are adopting extreme programming (XP) practices in order to overcome the challenges of software development in an increasingly dynamic environment. The ability to coordinate software developers’ efforts is critical in such conditions. Expertise coordination has been identified as an important emergent process through which software project teams manage non-routine challenges in software development. However, the extent to which XP enables software project teams to coordinate expertise is unknown. Drawing on the agile development and expertise coordination literatures, we examine the role of collective ownership and coding standards as processes and practices that govern coordination in software project teams. We examine the relationship between collective ownership, coding standards, expertise coordination, and software project technical quality in a field study of 56 software project teams comprising 509 software developers. We found that collective ownership and coding standards play a role in improving software project technical quality. We also found that collective ownership and coding standards moderated the relationship between expertise coordination and software project technical quality, with collective ownership attenuating the relationship and coding standards strengthening the relationship. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.
6. Venkatesh, V., Brown, S. A., Maruping, L. M., and Bala, H. (2008). Predicting different conceptualizations of system use: The competing roles of behavioral intention, facilitating conditions, and behavioral expectation. MIS Quarterly, 32(3) 483-502. (Lead research article)
Employees’ underutilization of new information systems undermines organizations’ efforts to gain benefits from such systems. The two main predictors of individual-level system use in prior research—behavioral intention and facilitating conditions—have limitations that we discuss. We introduce behavioral expectation as a predictor that addresses some of the key limitations and provides a better understanding of system use. System use is examined in terms of three key conceptualizations: duration, frequency, and intensity. We develop a model that employs behavioral intention, facilitating conditions, and behavioral expectation as predictors of the three conceptualizations of system use. We argue that each of these three determinants play different roles in predicting each of the three conceptualizations of system use. We test the proposed model in the context of a longitudinal field study of 321 users of a new information system. The model explains 65 percent, 60 percent, and 60 percent of the variance in duration, frequency, and intensity of system use respectively. We offer theoretical and practical implications for our findings.
5. Zhang, X., and Maruping, L. M. (2008). Household technology adoption in a global marketplace: Incorporating the role of espoused cultural values. Information Systems Frontiers, 10(4) 403-413.
This paper extends prior research in household technology adoption by incorporating the role of espoused cultural values. Specifically, we theorize that espoused cultural values individualism/collectivism, masculinity/ femininity, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation—play an important role in affecting consumers’ behaviors by altering consumers’ belief structures—attitudinal beliefs, normative beliefs, and control beliefs. Our theoretical model predicts that the impact of consumers’ belief structures on household technology adoption intention varies across consumers with different cultural values. Propositions are provided to explain how different cultural mechanisms moderate the relationships between consumers’ beliefs and household technology adoption intention. The paper concludes with theoretical implications, future research directions, and practical implications.
4. Cao, Q., Maruping, L. M., and Takeuchi, R. (2006). Disentangling the effects of CEO turnover and succession on organizational capabilities: A social network perspective. Organization Science, 17(5) 563-576.
Prior reviews of the CEO turnover and succession literature suggest that empirical findings on organizational implications continue to be equivocal. In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework for examining the impact of CEO turnover and succession on organizational capabilities. Using the social network perspective as a theoretical lens, we identify conditions in which CEO turnover is expected to influence organizational exploration and exploitation capabilities. We also identify contingencies under which CEO succession will moderate the impact of CEO turnover on organizational capabilities. Our framework provides a useful lens through which to view the consequences of CEO turnover and succession and sheds some light on the equivocal findings to date.
3. Stewart, K. J., Ammeter, A. P., and Maruping, L. M. (2006). Impacts of license choice and organizational sponsorship on user interest and development activity in open source software projects. Information Systems Research, 17(2) 126-144. (Lead research article)*
What differentiates successful from unsuccessful open source software projects? This paper develops and tests a model of the impacts of license restrictiveness and organizational sponsorship on two indicators of success: user interest in, and development activity on, open source software development projects. Using data gathered from Freshmeat.net and project home pages, the main conclusions derived from the analysis are that (1) license restrictiveness and organizational sponsorship interact to influence user perceptions of the likely utility of open source software in such a way that users are most attracted to projects that are sponsored by nonmarket organizations and that employ nonrestrictive licenses, and (2) licensing and sponsorship address complementary developer motivations such that the influence of licensing on development activity depends on what kind of organizational sponsor a project has. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, and the paper outlines several avenues for future research.
*This paper was one of 5 nominated for best paper at Information Systems Research for 2006.
2. Venkatesh, V., Maruping, L. M., and Brown, S. A. (2006). Role of time in self-prediction of behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 100(2) 160-176.
This paper examines three specific manifestations of time—anticipation (proximal vs. distal), prior experience with the behavior, and frequency (episodic vs. repeat)—as key contingencies affecting the predictive validity of behavioral intention, perceived behavioral control, and behavioral expectation in predicting behavior. These three temporal contingencies are examined in two longitudinal field studies: (1) study 1—a 6-month study of personal computer (PC) purchase behavior among 861 households and (2) study 2—a 12-month study among 321 employees in the context of a new technology implementation in an organization. In study 1, where the episodic behavior of PC purchase was examined, we found that increasing anticipation (i.e., more distal) weakened the relationship between behavioral intention and behavior and strengthened the relationship between behavioral expectation and behavior. In contrast, increasing experience strengthened the relationship between behavioral intention and behavior and weakened the relationship between behavioral expectation and behavior. In study 2, where the repeat behavior of technology use was examined, we found two significant 3-way interactions: (1) the relationship between behavioral intention and behavior was strongest when anticipation was low (i.e., proximal) and experience was high and (2) the relationship between behavioral expectation and behavior was strongest when anticipation was high (i.e., distal) and experience was low. 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Maruping, L. M., and Agarwal, R. (2004). Managing team interpersonal processes through technology: A task-technology fit perspective. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(6) 975-990.
This article addresses the broad question, How can virtual teams that manage a majority of their interactions through information and communication technologies (ICTs) be made more effective?
Focusing specifically on interpersonal interactions, the task–technology fit paradigm is used as the foundation for a theoretical model that seeks to identify how such teams can match available communication technologies to the different types of interpersonal interactions in which they engage. The authors draw on media synchronicity theory to identify the functionalities of the wide range of ICTs available today, and map these functionalities onto the salient communication needs of 3 key interpersonal processes: (a) conflict management, (b) motivation and confidence building, and (c) affect management. The model also incorporates a temporal dimension examining how the communication needs, and hence, the need for ICT functionality, varies depending on the virtual team’s developmental stage. Opportunities for future research arising from the theoretical model are discussed.
Focusing specifically on interpersonal interactions, the task–technology fit paradigm is used as the foundation for a theoretical model that seeks to identify how such teams can match available communication technologies to the different types of interpersonal interactions in which they engage. The authors draw on media synchronicity theory to identify the functionalities of the wide range of ICTs available today, and map these functionalities onto the salient communication needs of 3 key interpersonal processes: (a) conflict management, (b) motivation and confidence building, and (c) affect management. The model also incorporates a temporal dimension examining how the communication needs, and hence, the need for ICT functionality, varies depending on the virtual team’s developmental stage. Opportunities for future research arising from the theoretical model are discussed.