Debunking misinformation in times of crisis: Exploring misinformation correction strategies for effective internal crisis communication

This study aimed to explore misinformation correction strategies for effective internal crisis communication. Using an experimental study (N = 1196) with full-time employees in the United States, this study found that a corrective strategy using more elaborated facts was effective in protecting internal reputation and that timely, proactive communication to debunk crisis misinformation was a significant factor influencing employees' cognitive reactance (counterarguing) and behavioural outcomes. This research can help crisis communicators better understand how to prevent negative outcomes that undermine the effectiveness of evidence-based communication efforts. Specifically, the findings suggest the use of more proactive internal crisis communication to correct misinformation and to prevent damage caused by employees' misconceptions and related communication behaviours. Furthermore, the study theoretically extends the literature on debunking crisis-misinformation by elucidating the cognitive and behavioural processes of crisis misinformation in internal crisis communication.     

Exploring the effects of organizational justice,personal ethics and sanction on internet use policy compliance

Internet security risks, the leading security threats confronting today's organizations, often result from employees' non‐compliance with the internet use policy (IUP). Extant studies on compliance with security policies have largely ignored the impact of intrinsic motivation on employees' compliance intention. This paper proposes a theoretical model that integrates an intrinsic self‐regulatory approach with an extrinsic sanction‐based command‐and‐control approach to examine employees' IUP compliance intention. The self‐regulatory approach centers on the effect of organizational justice and personal ethical objections against internet abuses. The results of this study suggest that the self‐regulatory approach is more effective than the sanction‐based command‐and‐control approach. Based on the self‐regulatory approach, organizational justice not only influences IUP compliance intention directly but also indirectly through fostering ethical objections against internet abuses. This research provides empirical evidence of two additional effective levers for enhancing security policy compliance: organizational justice and personal ethics.     

The impact of leadership on employees' intended information security behaviour: An examination of the full‐range leadership theory

Explaining the influence of management leadership on employees' information security behaviour is an important focus in information systems research and for companies and organizations. Unfortunately, the role of leadership has remained largely unexplored in the information security context. Our study addresses this gap in literature: how the dimensions of full‐range leadership influence employees' intended information security behaviour. Consequently, our study takes an interactional psychology perspective and links the dimensions of the full‐range model of leadership to employees' security compliance intention and security participation intention. We tested our multitheoretical model using Smart PLS 3.2.7 on a proprietary data set of 322 professionals in more than 14 branches throughout different regions worldwide. Our study contributes to the literature on information security, management, and leadership by exploring how and why different leadership styles enhance employees' intended information security behaviour. Our empirical findings emphasize the importance of transformational leaders because they are capable of directly influencing employees on the extra‐role and in‐role behaviour levels. Our results indicate new directions for information security and leadership research and implications for leadership practices.     

Exploring HRM Meta‐Features that Foster Employees' Innovative Work Behaviour in Times of Increasing Work–Life Conflict

Today, employees' innovative work behaviour (IWB) is critical for companies' success. However, employees increasingly experience work–life conflict (WLC) which negatively influences performance at work. Human resource management (HRM) has the potential to foster employees' engagement in innovative activities and to reduce tensions between work and private life simultaneously. Our paper aims to advance understanding under which conditions these relations occur by exploring HRM meta‐features. These are defined as overall characteristics of an HR system helping companies to communicate the content of HR practices in a way that leads to desired interpretations by employees. Using a qualitative, interview study approach, we find that HRM contributes to IWB and diminishes feelings of WLC mainly through the four meta‐features ‘individual orientation’, ‘discretion orientation’, ‘effort orientation’ and ‘expectancy orientation’. We link our findings to extant literature and provide suggestions for managers how these meta‐features can be put into organizational practice.     

Information security policy noncompliance: An integrative social influence model

Despite the significant advancements made in understanding the factors that drive employees' compliance and noncompliance behaviours with information security policy (ISP), less is known about how different factors interact to impact such behaviours. Having been drawn on the social information processing theory, this research develops an integrative model that investigates how ethical work climate, beliefs, and neutralization interact to jointly explain ISP noncompliance. The model is tested via a survey of a broad cross section of employees. Neutralization, perceived cost of compliance, and perceived cost of noncompliance are found to significantly impact ISP noncompliance. Egoistic, benevolent, and principled climates are found to differentially influence neutralization and individuals' cognitive beliefs about the cost and benefit of ISP compliance versus noncompliance. Neutralization appears to be a more important moderator of the belief‐noncompliance relationship than the principled climate.     

Activating constructive employee behavioural responses in a crisis: Examining the effects of pre‐crisis reputation and crisis communication strategies on employee voice behaviours

This study explores how organizational management can promote employee voice behaviours, as positive behavioural reactions with constructive ideas, in responding to organizational crisis. Using an experimental study (N = 640) among full‐time employees in the United States, the study found that pre‐crisis internal reputation and crisis communication strategies—accommodative response and stealing thunder—positively and directly affected constructive employee voice behaviours in a crisis situation. Furthermore, the study revealed how post‐crisis internal reputation mediates the influences of pre‐crisis internal reputation and stealing thunder on positive/constructive and negative/destructive employee voice behaviours. The findings of this study contribute to the theoretical development of crisis communication in the internal context of an organization, especially with respect to employee voice behaviours. The study also highlights an important practical implication for crisis managers who can activate and promote positive employee behaviour voices, thereby influencing leadership's strategic decision‐making in an organizational crisis.     

Cognitive factors of the transfer of empirical engineering knowledge: A behavioral and fNIRS study

Knowledge transfer is a progressive method to accelerate knowledge accumulation and technological innovation of enterprises. This hot research topic remains explorative on improving knowledge transfer efficiency in employees' training and engineering practice. However, due to ambiguous cognitive structure, how concepts and knowledge are stored and utilized in employees' minds during problem-solving was poorly answered. Therefore, this paper proposed a concept-sorting test, inspired by the modified Wisconsin Card-Sorting Test (M-WCST), to investigate the near/far transfer mechanism of empirical engineering knowledge (EEK) under the technological paradigm shift. Concept classification experiments were carried out for 31 participants by functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to explore the neuroscience basis of EEK transfer. Transfer performance and cognitive load measured in concept-sorting tests showed: (1) The cognitive level of the prior technological paradigm positively increases the transfer performance. However, it causes more perseverative errors due to set patterns of thinking. (2) The transfer distance negatively decreases the performance. Hence the display materials which are different from the prior cognitive structure are not beneficial for participants to learn. (3) The transfer distance significantly impacts the cognitive load. The activation level of brain areas becomes higher when people finish the near EEK transfer and apply it to solve new problems. As an explorative study, the evidence from fNIRS can provide insights into the theory and practice of empirical knowledge management.     

The effects of the integration of external and internal communication features in digital magazines on consumers' magazine attitude

This study investigates the effects of external and internal communication features on consumers' digital magazine attitude, and the processes (i.e., perceived interactivity and social presence) underlying these effects. Both feature types enable communication between two or more people. Though, in the case of external communication features, the interactions take place outside the digital magazine (e.g., on Facebook), whereas in the case of internal communication features, the communication takes place inside the digital environment of the magazine. In a two-wave experiment with a 2 (external communication features: present/absent) × 2 (internal communication features: present/absent) between-subjects design, 192 participants were exposed to a digital tablet magazine in which the presence of interactive features was manipulated. The results show that digital magazines with either external or internal communication features are perceived as more interactive, which has a positive influence on consumers' digital magazine attitude. The findings also reveal that – in contrast to external – internal communication features have the ability to enhance feelings of social presence, another process through which digital magazine attitude is positively affected. So, internal communication features improve consumers' digital magazine attitude through two pathways (i.e., perceived interactivity and social presence), and external communication features only via one (i.e., perceived interactivity).     

Can crisis management teams mitigate COVID-19's effects? A comparative case study between China and the United States

The COVID-19 pandemic has been the world's greatest challenge since World War II. As an unprecedented global public health crisis, crisis management teams (CMTs) in the infected countries need to rethink to cope with the similar uncertainty and urgency of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The shared context of COVID-19 allows us to explore a cross-nation study of different constructs and CMT to communicate information about crises with the public effectively. Since the pandemic affected all countries, the comparison is warranted. Can CMTs mitigate the effects of COVID-19? Based on the analysis of China and the US cases, our study explores how shared and common knowledge cognition among crisis responders plays a pivotal role in effective CMTs' communication while technological failures and inadequate information disrupt the system, worsening pandemics like COVID-19. Furthermore, organizational dysfunction, such as institutional fragmentation, regulatory hurdles and bureaucratic arrogance, impede effective communication between CMTs. However, effective coordination and decisive leadership could improve coordination effectiveness and reduce crisis costs.     

Organizational culture and radical innovation: Does innovative behavior mediate this relationship?

Product innovation, in particular radical product innovation, is considered to have a positive effect on company success. As a consequence, there is growing interest in the literature on how to foster radical product innovation. Organizational culture is frequently cited as an antecedent. The underlying assumption is that the culture facilitates radical innovation by encouraging employees' innovative behavior. However, empirical research on the mediating role of employees' innovative behavior in the relation between organizational culture and radical product innovation is scarce. The purpose of this paper is to analyze this mediating role using a sample of Spanish firms. Findings show that adhocracy and market cultures are positively related with the degree of radicalness of product innovation and that employees' innovative behavior mediates that relation, but only in the case of the adhocracy culture.     

Resilient employees are creative employees,when the workplace forces them to be

With a basis in conservation of resources theory, this article considers the connection between employees' resilience and disruptive creative behaviour—conceptualized herein as the extent to which they generate radically new ideas for organizational improvement—as well as how this connection might be invigorated by resource‐draining work conditions that stem from excessive workloads and unfavourable decision‐making processes. Data collected through a survey administered to employees in an organization that operates in the distribution sector reveal that employees' resilience levels spur their disruptive creative behaviour, and this process is more prominent among employees who believe they have insufficient time to complete their work tasks (i.e., suffer from high work overload) and operate in organizational climates marked by high rigidity or dysfunctional politics. The findings accordingly inform organizational practitioners that the allocation of employees' personal resource bases to disruptive creative behaviours might be particularly useful among employees who face substantial adversity in their organizational functioning.     

Business continuity for times of vulnerability: Empirical evidence

Organizations operate in environments of vulnerability. While there are methodologies that guide business continuity management, it is evident that organizations remain vulnerable to disruptions emerging in times of transformation and systemic change. This work aims to compile and analyze the disruptions and related risk management strategies or activities described in the literature, and explore which disruptions are creating concern in companies and how they approach them. The methodology is based on a review of the literature and from the review we define a questionnaire to guide semi-structured interviews to managers from companies all located in a highly volatile macroeconomic context. The literature describes disruptions related with governance, cyberattacks, technology, supply chain, internal processes, and shock events and both precrises and postcrises strategies. The empirical analysis using data from companies reveals that (a) the most stressful disruptions are the currency devaluation, the high inflation rate, and government interventions and (b) managers rely on collaborative work, effective communication between stakeholders, supportive leadership, and constant adaptation to the new environment. Future research is required on techniques supporting adaptation to ‘new normalcy’.     

A socio‐cognitive interpretation of the potential effects of downsizing on software quality performance

Organizational downsizing research indicates that downsizing does not always realize its strategic intent and may, in fact, have a detrimental impact on organizational performance. In this paper, we extend the notion that downsizing negatively impacts performance and argue that organizational downsizing can potentially be detrimental to software quality performance. Using social cognitive theory (SCT), we primarily interpret the negative impacts of downsizing on software quality performance by arguing that downsizing results in a realignment of social networks (environmental factors), thereby affecting the self‐efficacy and outcome expectations of a software professional (personal factors), which, in turn, affect software quality performance (outcome of behaviour undertaken). We synthesize relevant literature from the software quality, SCT and downsizing research streams and develop a conceptual model. Two major impacts of downsizing are hypothesized in the conceptual model. First, downsizing destroys formal and informal social networks in organizations, which, in turn, negatively impacts software developers' self‐efficacy and outcome expectations through their antecedents, with consequent negative impacts on software development process efficiency and software product quality, the two major components of software quality performance. Second, downsizing negatively affects antecedents of software development process efficiency, namely top management leadership, management infrastructure sophistication, process management efficacy and stakeholder participation with consequent negative impacts on software quality performance. This theoretically grounded discourse can help demonstrate how organizational downsizing can potentially impact software quality performance through key intervening constructs. We also discuss how downsizing and other intervening constructs can be managed to mitigate the negative impacts of downsizing on software quality performance.     

Moving beyond the direct impact of using CRM systems on frontline employees' service performance: The mediating role of adaptive behaviour

Despite substantial investments in customer‐relationship‐management (CRM) systems, companies continue to experience pain rather than profit. Meanwhile, the concept of “adaptive behaviour” of frontline employees has received little attention in the literature related to CRM systems in which the frontline employees are the primary users. In this study, we propose that with the aid of CRM systems, individual employees are able to immediately access information about customers and service offerings, thus enabling their adaptive behaviours to provide personalized service to individual customers. Based on coping theory, we develop a CRM system‐driven adaptive behaviour model that explains how CRM systems facilitate individual employees' service performance by enabling adaptive behaviour during their service encounters. Multisourced data from a financial company in China largely support our proposed model, showing that employees' postadoption of CRM systems (routinization and infusion of use) enables interpersonal and offering adaptive behaviours, which in turn enhance employees' service performance. In addition, forming a postadoption behaviour of CRM systems relies on the frequent use. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of adaptive behaviour in service encounters with the aid of CRM systems.     

Making the most out of the innovation of meaning: The importance of inclusion for creativity in inside-out envisioning

Innovation of meaning (IoM) is one of the streams that has attracted attention in design thinking research. Inside-out envisioning aims to assist non-designer employees practice IoM in a similar manner to how visionary executives and designers perform. The process starts with exposing their intrinsic visions to innovate the dominant social or organizational meanings. This makes the employees' creativity that comes from intrinsic goals and values an important driving force of inside-out envisioning. Thus, it is crucial to foster an organizational culture that encourages employees to engage in inside-out envisioning and enhance their creativity. This study explores whether inclusion, as an organizational culture, is an antecedent of creativity in inside-out envisioning. Inclusion refers to a state in which an individual's uniqueness is valued by other group members and externalized to improve group performance. Based on data from a survey conducted with 1104 Japanese employees, this study reveals that inclusion significantly impacts creativity in inside-out envisioning. A multigroup analysis demonstrates differences in the effects of the mediating variables of this relationship based on the successful experience of inside-out envisioning. This study concludes that it is important for design thinking researchers to study inclusion more deeply as a way to implement inside-out envisioning.     

Creating Ideas for Innovation: Effects of Organizational Distance on Knowledge Creation Processes

Innovation is to a large extent considered a social and communicative process, and input from other individuals potentially improves the generation of novel and valuable ideas also in the early stages of idea creation and development. Both colleagues inside organizations and external parties have frequently been proposed as important sources of information and knowledge within this part of the innovation process. Other contributions addressing social networks and innovation bring into focus the potentially negative effects that certain network structures may have on innovation, pointing to inconsistencies in received theory. In order to address these inconsistencies, an empirical study of ideation in a Swedish multinational firm was performed, taking into account two different knowledge creation processes – combination and in‐depth analysis – and their inter‐relationships with organizational distance between contributing individuals. Data was collected using a survey and was analysed using regression models. It was found that different levels of organizational distance correlate with different knowledge creation processes. In‐depth analysis occurred more often with employees' close colleagues, whereas the combination of existing ideas and information was more frequent in interaction with employees' close colleagues and with external parties. Both these interaction patterns were also found to be positive for the generation of patents, whereas no such relationship could be seen when individuals interacted with colleagues in other departments in the same firm. The findings have implications for theory on cognitive distance, and also suggest that management needs to facilitate different types of collaboration and networking when aiming to facilitate and support ideation, taking into consideration the type of innovation aimed for, as well as its supporting knowledge creation processes.     

Reducing the harmful effect of work overload on creative behaviour: Buffering roles of energy‐enhancing resources

This study investigates how employees' perceptions of work overload might reduce their creative behaviours and how this negative relationship might be buffered by employees' access to three energy‐enhancing resources: their passion for work, their ability to share emotions with colleagues, and their affective commitment to the organization. Data from a manufacturing organization reveal that work overload reduces creative behaviour, but the effect is weaker with higher levels of passion for work, emotion sharing, and organizational commitment. The buffering effects of emotion sharing and organizational commitment are particularly strong when they combine with high levels of passion for work. These findings indicate how organizations marked by adverse work conditions, due to excessive workloads, can mitigate the likelihood that employees avoid creative behaviours.     

Interface design and emotions experienced on B2C Web sites: Empirical testing of a research model

This paper examines the impact of four Web site interface features on the cognitive process that trigger online shoppers’ emotions, operationalized as mental states of readiness that arise from appraisal of events and considered as direct antecedents to approach or avoidance behaviors. A research model was tested with data collected from 215 Web shopping episodes for low-touch merchandise. Results show that shoppers experienced all six emotions posited in the model. The emotions of liking and joy were experienced intensively by a substantial number of shoppers. The results also demonstrate that interface features – key components of the usability of a Web site – influenced the three cognitive appraisals illustrated in the research model. Moreover, the cognitive appraisals of situational state and control potential impacted the six emotions examined. This paper also highlights several theoretical contributions and managerial implications that should help managers and Web site managers improve the interface design of their Web sites in order to facilitate information gathering and better support online shopping processes.     

How employees' perception of information technology application and their knowledge management capacity influence organisational performance

This study investigates how workers' gender, work experience, designated division, and appointment affect (i) their perception of information technology (IT) within the organisation, (ii) their self-perceived capacity in knowledge management (KM), and (iii) their perception of organisational performance (OP). Furthermore, the study also examines the correlation among the above three dimensions by using t-test, one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Pearson correlation and stepwise regression analysis. These results show a positive correlation among IT application, KM capacity, and OP. In addition, the study discovers that (i) adequate IT investment and acceptance will improve employees' KM capacity, (ii) appropriate IT investment and training and employees' knowledge replication ability can better predict organisational outcomes, and (iii) employees' KM capacity is a better predictor of OP than IT application. Results also show that personal factors do affect workers' perception of the organisation's IT application, their KM capacity, and overall OP.     

Perceived usefulness of podcasting in organizational learning: The role of information characteristics

Podcasting has been used widely to support individuals' learning activities. However, most of the research focuses its use in formal educational contexts. Little attention has been paid to the use of podcasting in organizational settings to support employees' learning activities. To address this gap, this research investigates employees' perceived usefulness (PU) of podcasting to facilitate their learning activities within organizational settings. Using a global company as the case study, the data collected through semi-structured interviews were analyzed using qualitative techniques. The study finds that the characteristics of the information delivered by the podcasts (i.e., information overload, information privacy, and information relevance) play an important role in shaping employees' PU to adopt podcasting for learning. Excitement toward the technology and tenure are also found to have an impact. In fact, contrary to prior findings, which showed the importance of emotions occurring during the use of technologies, towards their ultimate adoption, this study finds that emotions (excitement in our case) in anticipation of podcasting implementation plays a significant role in individual's PU towards adoption. Further, we develop a set of propositions to discuss the relationships between these factors and the PU of podcasting in organizational settings. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.