ABSTRACT:
This final issue of the 41st volume of the Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS) is opened by the Special Section on Information Technology to Improve Mental Health. Its contributions are intrinsically important as the impaired mental health afflicts growing numbers of people in the contemporary societies and as information technologies (IT) are expanding their capabilities to meet some of the needs of these individuals. There are multiple causes of the deficiencies in mental health in the societies where ever more people are unmoored from their traditional roots, stressed with the growing tempo of work and personal life—and affected by some of the effects of the IT. There is also a growing recognition of the previously ignored or unrecognized syndromes and a willingness to confront these afflictions. In their introduction to the Special Section, the Guest Editors, Corey Angst, Alan R. Dennis, Elena Karahanna, and Gondy Leroy, highlight what the two papers they include contribute to the automatic depression detection with the deep-learning artificial intelligence (AI) and to the screening for a variety of mental disorders with explainable AI. Both papers set the AI systems in the context of augmentative deployment. The works innovatively contribute to our knowledge of AI-assisted medical diagnostics. They are complementing the recent developments in the AI-assisted therapeutics related to mental health. For example, AI companions are found to achieve a degree of success in addressing such gateways to psychological afflictions as loneliness [1].
Beyond its intrinsic value, the Special Section illustrates well two aspects of the long-term mission commitments of JMIS. The Journal has always stood for a broad understanding of the scope of our field in the scholarly exploration and advancement of organizational computing. This inclusivity is called for as the scholarly domain of Information Systems (IS) is driven by the ever new, and in some cases transformative, technologies. The innovative exploration and discovery of the theoretically-based uses and impacts of these technologies moves forward our salience and the refinement of our theoretical base, with multiple methodologies we use and develop. The Special Section showcases the AI-based advancements—even as the AI artifacts we are now deploying are so different in their design and possibilities and yet so constant in its aims that were conceived nearly 70 years ago when that research field was defined. Now AI has truly entered IS. The other aspect of the JMIS mission brought out with the two studies is the goal of improving mental health with IT, as a part of our epistemological commitment to research in the service of the inclusive well-being of society. Our worth as a field that uniquely combines behavioral study with the socio-technical exploration of IT is defined not only by the theoretical advances we make in our research, but also with our contribution to the lives of the individuals and to the functioning of the societal aggregates in behalf of the individuals.
Generative AI (GAI) is now able to meaningfully assist the core of our research, as shown in the first paper of the general section by Yaxian Zhou, Yufei Yuan, Kai Huang, and Xiangpei Hu. The authors apply ChatGPT to perform a considerable part of qualitative data analysis within the research methodology based on the grounded theory. In this paper, a GAI chatbot is able to perform the role of a research assistant. Notably, GAI is deployed under the human researcher’s guidance, within the setting of risk analysis. Even more notably, the results achieved by the AI system are found to be comparable to those achieved by humans under the specified performance metrics. This work, which will be certainly built upon in the future, breaks new ground both in strengthening a given research methodology and in allowing us to extend the approach to others. Beyond that, the paper showcases the use of GAI as an assistive technology in seeking not only efficiency but also effectiveness in research work. As the boundary between the human work and AI agents shifts toward the AI participation, the theory developed in this paper should sustain us in our future work.
The theme of augmentative use of AI is continued in the next paper. Xiaolin Lin, Xuequn Wang, Bin Shao, and Joseph Taylor offer a qualitative study of the impact of AI-enabled chatbots on employee performance in customer service. The authors present a theoretically-developed and validated model relating the impact of chatbots to the perceived employee work performance. The specific chatbots affordances that lead to the post-adoptive chatbot use are identified. It is important to note that along with the informational support of workers, their emotional support is a part of the model, which takes us back to the research on the prerequisites of mental well-being of individuals, fostered by AI-based systems.
Data breaches are a serious and widespread affliction within the realm of IS, and JMIS as well as other leading journals have published numerous research studies of their antecedents, their course, and their consequences. Our field has also researched a great variety of prevention, mitigation, and response strategies. However, considering the resources involved and the reputational fallout in a response to a data breach, it is important to discriminate among the breaches rather than provide one-size-fits-all response with the maximum resource expenditure (such as monetary compensation). Here, Hamid Reza Nikkhah and Varun Grover base themselves in the theory of situational crisis response to offer a nuanced empirically-based findings regarding the effective response to the principal external stakeholders of a breached firm, that is, customers and investors, in the case of a breach. The situational effectiveness is defined as meeting the expectation of these stakeholders at the least cost to the affected organization.
The two following papers investigate the effects of fault lines in different organizational units: in corporate boards and in virtual teams. Imported from geology, the term fault lines indicates a split within an organizational collective, which can be based on a variety of factors. The first of the papers, authored by Moksh Matta, Jinglu Jiang, Surinder Kahai, and Rajiv Sabherwal, investigates the effects of three types of fault lines within the boards of directors: knowledge-based, identity-based, and resource-based (the latter defined by the unequal ability to exert power). The effects investigated is the ability of the board to positively affect the value of IT to the firm in the given environmental context, which is dichotomized into both resource-munificent and scarcity in resources. Considering the legally defined roles of corporate boards and their general importance, as well as the growing role of IT in view of the AI-furthered transformations, the empirically-based paper carries weight in our understanding of organizational computation.
With the various organizational arrangements in respect to hybrid work environments, virtual teams are common, and their effectiveness is challenged by the absence of colocation. Work coordination, and thus well-functioning team communication, is always of the moment. How do the fault lines in the team’s composition affect that effectiveness? That is the research question posed by Sut I Wong, Limei Zhang, Matej Černe, and Nils Brede Moe. Fault lines here are defined as the presence of subgroups identified by their distinct communications. Grounding themselves in well-known communication theories, the authors empirically show the deleterious effects of fault lines, particularly the stronger ones, on the functioning of the virtual teams. The authors offer pragmatic suggestions, along with their contribution to the communications theories in organizational settings.
Co-creation of value by unaffiliated individuals along with the firm’s employees, when properly actuated, is one of the signal achievements of the Internet era. Crowdsourcing is now a significant source of innovation as it expands the organizational knowledge base with diverse sources of knowledge, particularly if the participation and the content delivered by the “crowd” of solvers are carefully curated. We have advanced far beyond the early efforts of unrewarded (other than by intrinsic motivators) solitary contributors. The state of the art is to attract competent solver teams with significant monetary rewards to crowdsourcing competitions. Eliciting high-quality input is difficult, and competition is a major means to do so. In the next paper, Indika Dissanayake, Mahmut Yasar, Mahyar Sharif Vaghefi, and Sridhar P. Nerur present their investigation of the effects of prize structure, the number of participants, and, in particular, the complexity of the task on performance in the open innovation contests. As it is quite easy to deliver yourself on crowdsourcing and receive poor outcomes, the results presented here should serve well the solution seekers and the platform providers to do otherwise.
Companies’ online platforms serve marketing purposes of the owner with both firm-generated content (FGC) and user-generated content (UGC), such as consumer reviews. Wanxin Qiao, Ni Huang, and Zhijun Yan investigate the contingencies on the trajectory from FGC to sales, in the context of healthcare platforms. The context adopted here clearly affects the sensitivity of the current and potential clients (patients) to the content provided. The researchers show the influence of the UGC in particular on the effects of FGC. The intricate interdependence between the two forms of platform content is surfaced in the paper, which contributes both to the theory of consumer decision-making and to the practice of the organizational platform design. With the now possible GAI-enabled geolocational customization of FGC the work gains in salience.
Exploring the role of gender in seeking IT work is an important avenue in our aiming at the inclusive well-being of society. The essential question asked in the concluding paper of this JMIS issue is: Does gender play a role in looking for projects in more competitive and uncertain circumstances? As has been long established, both the competition and reward uncertainty characterize the general IT working environment (as they are present in numerous others fields). Yifei Wang, Nishtha Langer, and Anandasivam Gopal ask this question by more specifically addressing themselves to the women’s propensity to do so. The authors perform a series of lab experiments to gain the answer. They find that women are more likely to bid in an open market for projects characterized both by higher competition and by higher coordination needs reflecting complexity and uncertainty. If we do not find women succeeding in such bids while they aim to, there is a lot to think about in our profession, and there is much research to be done as to the causes.