Prashant Palvia

29 Years! That is a long time indeed. The first issue of the Journal of Global Information Technology Management (JGITM) was published in January 1998. The Internet had just arrived on the scene, a...

This Technology Manager's Notebook Article presents ten insights explicating the reasons why women IT professionals leave the IT field. This study analyzes the data obtained from 10,386 IT employees in 37 countries, collected during the World IT Project, the largest academic IT study ever conducted. The findings indicate that at the highest risk of permanently leaving the IT profession are women who are employed part-time; have less education and, as a result, work in supporting and liaison roles rather than in traditional core (i.e., men-dominated) IT positions; are between 21 and 29 years old; belong to an organization in a non-IT industry that has not reached a high level of organizational IT maturity and employs fewer than 200 people; and exhibit high uncertainty avoidance and low individualism. Women occupying middle- and senior-level managerial positions are also more likely to leave IT than their non-managerial counterparts. The insights reveal an archetype of a woman IT employee who is at the highest risk of permanently leaving the IT profession and lead to practical recommendations for IT managers and policymakers.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how organizations may improve their agility in order to respond to environmental turbulence by developing an appropriate organizational strategy and adapting their Information Technology (IT) function. It analyzes a dataset containing responses from 10,386 IT professionals located in 37 countries, which was collected as part of the World IT Project. The findings show that to become agile and prosper in a turbulent environment, organizations should both innovate and differentiate themselves from their competition: in other words, they should become Prospectors and employ a differentiation strategy. They also need to invest heavily in their IT human capital by way of increasing their IT personnel and establishing effective collaboration between non-IT and IT workers. Such steps would ensure the maximization of IT resources and facilitate efficient business-IT alignment. However, on the flip side, navigating a turbulent business environment can take its toll on employees who experience work exhaustion and become less satisfied with their jobs.

The information technology (IT) workforce is characterized by several unique and contextual factors, such as the technology, the occupation itself, and the human factors. Among the human factors, global information systems (IS) studies have examined the role of national culture to explain many workforce differences and nuances across nations. In such cross-cultural research, IS researchers have primarily utilized the published scores of national culture dimensions as provided by the preeminent social psychologist and culture scholar Geert Hofstede and have applied them to various IT populations within a country. Given that the IT profession is unique in many respects, and there is cultural heterogeneity within a country, our study embarked on independently measuring and verifying the national culture values of IT employees in 37 countries. By using the original Hofstede scales, scores were obtained on five national culture dimensions: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, masculinity, and long-term orientation. We found significant differences between the national culture scores of IT employees and those available in the literature for the general population. Our results are novel and have profound significance. There are major implications for both past and future studies in cross-cultural research as well as for practitioners who interpret and utilize the findings of such research.

Purpose: This study aims to develop a unified theoretical framework that presents a cohesive picture of workplace cyberbullying to better understand the interplay between cyberbullying, its effects on organizations and organizational controls enacted to contain these effects.Design/methodology/approach: The study conducts a theoretical review of the workplace cyberbullying literature between 2005 and 2021 drawing upon existing literature and two important theories, the routine activities theory and control theory. The final sample of 54 empirical papers represents a comprehensive body of literature on cyberbullying published across various disciplines.Findings: A theoretical model of workplace cyberbullying is developed, which highlights major antecedents to workplace cyberbullying and its impact on individual employees as well as organizations.Originality/value: As firms increasingly rely on information and communication technologies (ICTs), the misuse of ICTs in the form of cyberbullying is also increasing. Workplace cyberbullying severely hurts an organization’s employees and compromises the efficacy of its information systems. Fortunately, various controls can be utilized by firms to minimize workplace cyberbullying and its attendant costs. In all, eleven propositions are offered, providing a robust agenda for future research. The authors also offer insights for practitioners on how to minimize cyberbullying in the workplace and its damaging effects.

This study examines why some social media users choose to stop using these platforms, despite their widespread popularity. The research suggests that negative experiences associated with social media, which is referred to as the dark side of social media, can lead to feelings of regret and a desire to discontinue use. Privacy controls are also found to be important factors in users' decisions to discontinue using social media. Using case studies and an interpretive approach, the study proposes a new theoretical model for understanding social media discontinuance intention. It shows that regret is influenced by the dark side of social media that includes cyberbullying, misinformation, information overload, misuse, and online social stress. Regret and privacy control both influence discontinuance intention. In addition, the model identifies privacy controls as mitigating tools for regret, and summarizes privacy control types and methods that can alleviate the effects of dark side.

Although the IT workforce has become increasingly global, much of the research on issues related to IT workers published in leading academic journals is conducted in the U.S. However, the majority of the world does not share the same context as the U.S. Despite that, comparative studies exploring country differences rarely demonstrate how and why these differences occur on a global scale. By relying on a dataset based on a survey of more than 10 000 IT workers in 37 countries, we employed the decision tree technique to build an accurate model of IT job turnover in the U.S. We then applied this model to 36 countries to test whether it is more accurate in countries that are similar to the U.S. in terms of their geographical proximity to the U.S. and the proximity of their cultural, political, and labor market contexts. The findings demonstrate that while the U.S. model of IT job turnover is not necessarily less accurate for countries that are geographically farther from the U.S., it is less applicable in the countries with cultural, political, and labor market conditions different from those of the U.S. Thus, global IT managers are recommended to interpret the U.S.-centric literature with caution.

Information systems (IS) research paradigms, models, and findings are largely developed in the context of the U.S. and Western Europe; therefore, they are applicable primarily to the Western context and have limited relevance elsewhere. In response to this incomplete view and potential bias, the World Information Technology (IT) Project was launched more than five years ago to examine many topics, including the nature of organizational IS issues in various parts of the world. Using a common survey instrument, data were collected from IT employees in 37 countries. These 37 countries provide a good representation of the world as they exhibit different economic, cultural, political, religious, and regional differences. Results demonstrate the fallacy of the Western views and reveal that the globe does not always follow them. While there are a few common issues among the 37 countries, namely: IT reliability and efficiency, and security and privacy; more significantly, there are important differences. A cluster analysis of the country data corroborates the findings and divides countries into two groups: those with strategic issues and those with tactical and operational issues. Overall, the study underscores the importance of visioning beyond ethnocentric views and expanding our horizons to the global IT landscape. Particularly, business and IT executives need to address country and regional differences when pursuing international endeavors.