No abstract

The mum effect-a project member's reluctance to report bad news about a troubled project-has been recognized as an important contributor to project failure. While there are many potential factors that can influence the mum effect, in this study we focus on two factors that are particularly important in today's software development environment: (1) the issue of fault responsibility that arises in the context of outsourced IT projects that involve an external vendor, and (2) the issue of time urgency, which has become more important as firms seek to compete on "Internet time," developing and delivering applications with greater speed than ever before. We draw upon the basic whistle-blowing model adapted from Dozier and Miceli (1985) to examine how fault responsibility and time urgency ultimately affect a project member's IT project reporting decision. Based on the results of a controlled laboratory experiment, we confirmed that the basic whistle-blowing model holds in an IT project context and found that both fault responsibility and time urgency can have significant effects on an individual's willingness to report bad news. Fault responsibility exerts both direct and indirect influence on willingness to report bad news, while time urgency was found only to exert an indirect influence on willingness to report bad news. One implication of our study is that when fault responsibility rests with an outside vendor, this can actually increase the probability that a client employee will report the bad news to his or her management, provided that the vendor is not able to hide the problem entirely from the client organization. With respect to time urgency, our results suggest that managers may be able to increase individuals' willingness to report by emphasizing that there is a narrow window of time to correct defects before a project is delivered and the impacts of defects start to be felt. Contributions and directions for future research are discussed.

An individual's reluctance to report bad news about a troubled information technology (IT) project has been suggested as an important contributor to project failure and has been linked to IT project escalation as well. To date, information systems researchers have drawn from the mum effect and whistle-blowing literature to gain a better understanding of the factors that influence bad news reporting. More recent theoretical work in the area of organizational silence offers a promising new conceptual lens, but remains empirically untested. In this research note, we integrate key elements of Morrison and Milliken's (2000) model of organizational silence, which has never been empirically tested, with the basic whistle-blowing model adapted from Dozier and Miceli (1985). Using a role-playing experiment, we investigate how organizational structures/policies, managerial practices, and degree of demographic dissimilarity between employees and top managers create a climate of silence and how this climate, in turn, affects an individual's willingness to report. Our results show that all three types of factors contribute to a climate of silence, exerting both direct and indirect influence on willingness to report, as hypothesized. The implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.

Online learning has become more popular in higher education with its advantages of flexibility and accessibility. However, there have been challenges to students’ learning experience in online learning. One critical challenge would be providing interactions between students and instructors as good or effective as in the face‐to‐face environment. However, providing face‐to‐face interactions in online learning is not feasible because students and instructors are not physically present together. In this study, we introduce and empirically investigate social presence as student learning experience in online learning in which physical presence does not exist. Drawing upon the social presence and online learning literature, we propose a research model to explore how the interactivity of communication tools can drive social presence and student satisfaction in online learning. Furthermore, this study examines gender difference as a moderator in the model. Data were collected from undergraduate students who were taking online business statistics courses where an interactive communication tool was required to use for class communication and collaboration. The results showed that social presence driven by tool interactivity had a significant impact on student satisfaction in online learning. We also found that gender difference moderated the relationship between tool interactivity and social presence in online learning.