Hillol Bala’s research while affiliated with Indiana University Health and other places

Information representations such as ratings and reviews play an important role in assisting users to make decisions in online environments. Prior information systems (IS) research has mostly focused on the role of extreme valence, i.e., positivity and/or negativity of information, portrayed by such representations. Yet this bipolar approach discounts how coexistence of positivity and negativity, i.e., ambivalence, or their absence, i.e., indifference, are formed and resolved into distinct attentional processes and outcomes such as purchase decisions, relative to extreme valence. We theorize how and why the valence of information projected through such representations may elicit mixed feelings and influence decision-making in online environments. We conduct four randomized controlled experiments, including an electroencephalography (EEG) study, to disentangle the influence of ambivalence and indifference on decision-making in an online shopping context. We find that ambivalence and indifference to online information distinctly influence attention and purchase decisions relative to positivity and negativity. Our findings further suggest the inability of the incumbent bipolar representations, such as the widely implemented star-rating system, in capturing mixed feelings expressed in online content. We propose a bivariate intervention that overcomes limitations of bipolar representations by not only discerning ambivalence from indifference, but also amplifying purchase decisions for products with ambivalent information by at least 50 percent compared to the incumbent bipolar representations. Our findings advance ongoing research on the role of information valence in online environments and suggest implications for practice.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced most individuals to work from home. Simultaneously, there has been an uptake of digital platform use for personal purposes. The excessive use of technology for both work and personal activities may cause technostress. Despite the growing interest in technostress, there is a paucity of research on the effects of work and personal technology use in tandem, particularly during a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a sample of 306 employees, this paper addresses this research gap. The findings highlight how both work and personal digital platforms induce technostress during the enforced remote work period, which in turn increases psychological strains such as technology exhaustion and decreases subjective wellbeing. Study results also show that employees with previous remote working experience could better negotiate technostress, whereas those with high resilience experience decreased wellbeing in the presence of technostress-induced technology exhaustion in the enforced remote work context.

As information technology (IT) continues to be an integral yet evolving component in work settings, organizations need to ensure that they realize value from IT. Prior studies examining the post-adoption consequences of IT use in terms of employee job outcomes have been inconclusive with respect to the magnitude and direction of these impacts—i.e., the positive, negative, and nonsignificant impacts of IT use on job outcomes. The question of under what conditions IT use leads to favorable job outcomes over time thus remains largely unanswered. We develop a model of IT-related contingencies that integrates core constructs from the IT adoption research with two key job outcomes: job satisfaction and job performance. We hypothesize that in the post-adoption phase, technology-job fit is a key moderator of the relationships between IT use for supporting sales operations and job outcomes. Further, we suggest a theoretical extension of the classical predictors of IT adoption—perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use—as we expect them to moderate the effect of IT use on job performance over time. We tested our model in a longitudinal field study among 295 field sales personnel over a 24-month period. We found that although IT use had a negative effect on job satisfaction during the post-adoption phase, this effect was moderated by technology-job fit such that the negative effect was significantly attenuated by technology-job fit. We also found that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and technology-job fit enhanced the positive effect of IT use on job performance. Our findings offer insights into the mechanisms and conditions related to the post-adoption impacts of IT use on key job outcomes.

One opportunity for organizations to participate in open source software (OSS) development is through organizations OSS (orgsOSS), a term we use to describe a group of organizations that commit resources to collectively develop OSS. This archetype of OSS development is distinct from other types that include organizations, yet is understudied. As organizations increasingly contribute to and rely on OSS as part of their strategy, understanding how they can collaborate to build software holds importance for the future of software development. This study collects a unique dataset of development tasks from a large orgsOSS project spanning over two years and seven releases. Building on existing OSS research, we explore norms with respect to collaboration, i.e., how developers assign, discuss, and complete tasks, in an orgsOSS project. Interestingly, our analysis reveals that developers in orgsOSS do not always adhere to ideals of widespread sharing and participation espoused by traditional OSS, however some developer and task characteristics helped foster these ideals. Based on these and other findings, we develop a set of propositions and associated collaboration mechanisms that are important to future orgsOSS and other similarly structured software development projects.

Although research has suggested that enterprise system (ES) implementations have major impacts on employee job characteristics and outcomes, there has been limited research that has examined the impacts of ES implementations on interpersonal relationships over time. Building on and extending recent studies that have examined changes in employee job characteristics and outcomes during an ES implementation, this research examined the nature, extent, determinants, and outcomes of changes in an important interpersonal relationship construct—coworker exchange (CWX)—following an ES implementation. CWX is considered a critical aspect of employees’ job and an important determinant of their success in the workplace. Drawing on social exchange theory, we theorize that employees will perceive a change in CWX following an ES implementation. A longitudinal field study over a period of 6 months among 249 employees was conducted. Latent growth modeling was used to analyze the data. We found that employees’ work process characteristics, namely perceived process complexity, perceived process rigidity, and perceived process radicalness, significantly explained change, i.e., decline in our case, in CWX during the shakedown phase of an ES implementation. The decreasing trajectory of change in CWX led to declining job performance and job satisfaction. The role of CWX and its importance in the context of ES implementations is a key novel element of this work.

The proliferation of technologies has made information ubiquitously available to individuals who rely on it to make decisions or conduct transactions. We focus on how and why valence of information may elicit mixed reactions among individuals and potentially influence their decision-making process. Prior research in IS has primarily focused on positive and negative reactions to technology (in most cases separately). We examine the simultaneous presence of positive and negative dispositions—ambivalence. We theorize and show how ambivalence will elicit distinct behavioral responses and evoke attentional processes. We use electroencephalography (EEG) to conduct a within subject repeated measures laboratory experiment to illustrate these effects. Our results highlight that individuals experiencing ambivalence due to valence incongruent information exhibit a higher involvement of attentional processes than individuals who experience other types of information valence, i.e., positivity, negativity, and indifference. Individuals experiencing ambivalence also expressed different levels of behavioral intention to use a product from individuals who experienced positive, negative, and indifferent valence of information.

Research on enterprise systems (ES) implementation has focused on different aspects of implementation challenges, employee reactions, and system success. Much of this research has been conducted in developed countries and a few developing countries. This raises an obvious question about the applicability of findings to other contexts with different social and organisational cultures. We examine ES implementations in 12 organisations in Saudi Arabia, an important economic and political frontier and a unique sociocultural context in the Arab World. Using sociotechnical systems theory and institutional theory and the literature on contextualisation, we studied contextual aspects of three important factors related to ES implementations – i.e., ownership and governance, scope management, and employee empowerment. We found that the nature of ownership and governance plays a significant hindering role during implementation. Further, Saudi organisations implementing ES faced major challenges in managing the scope of implementation due to interferences from the top management and/or owners, and lack of justification by the consultants. Finally, we found that owners and top management were deeply concerned about losing their control over employees following ES implementations. We extend prior research and theories by offering contextual explanations unearthed from a context that is different from developed and many developing countries.