With over forty years' experience, Emerald Group Publishing is a leading independent publisher of global research with impact in business, society, public policy and education. In total, Emerald publishes over 275 journals and more than 130 book series, as well as an extensive range of online products and services. Emerald is both COUNTER 3 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.

A review of the literature shows the factors that impact on the effectiveness of virtual teams are still ambiguous. To address this problem we developed a research design that included a meta-analysis of the literature, a field experiment and survey. The meta-analysis identified factors which impact on the effectiveness of virtual teams which were then validated by a field experiment and survey. The results of the study indicate that social dimensional factors need to be considered early on in the virtual team creation process and are critical to the effectiveness of the team. Communication is a tool that directly influences the social dimensions of the team and in addition the performance of the team has a positive impact on satisfaction with the virtual team. A major contribution of the paper is an integrated model of factors that contribute to virtual team effectiveness

No abstract

No abstract

The impact of social and cultural factors on the adoption of technology still requires much research. To investigate it more fully, we examine the reasons for the adoption and non-adoption of mobile banking in Ghana. Through a survey of 271 people in Ghana, it has been found that social and cultural factors in the form of perceived credibility, facilitating conditions, perceived elitisation and demographic factors do play a significant role in adoption decisions. It has been found that elitisation of technology and services can be a positive influence for adopters whilst being a negative influence for non-adopters. In addition, perceived credibility and facilitating conditions also influence attitudes towards the technology. When these factors are added to a range of demographic factors, the impact of the social and cultural features of the context of studies can be seen as significant.

The Internet has had a major impact on tourism both for providers and consumers.This article classifies and analyzes the wealth of research published in major tourism journals over the past 10 years to identify major areas of focus and gaps in the research landscape related to the Internet in tourism. Research articles have substantially increased in number over the past 5 years of the 10-year period under analysis. The research can be categorized into seven areas with information search, website analysis, and Internet marketing being the three most common research topics. Although Internet-related issues in tourism are commonly researched, the article calls for more case study research to be conducted that takes an e-business and organizational perspective so that other organizations can learn from the mistakes made and also from best practice.

The evaluation of information technology (IT) is fraught with misconception and there is a lack of understanding of appropriate IT evaluation methods and techniques. The benefits, costs and risks of IT need to be identified, managed, and controlled if businesses are to derive value from their investments. This paper presents findings from an exploratory study that used a questionnaire survey to determine the benefits, costs and risks of IT investments from 130 small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Australia. The analysis revealed that organizations from different industry sectors significantly differ in the amount they invest in IT but that firm size (in terms of turnover and number of employees) does not influence IT investment levels. Second, strategic benefits vary across different industry sectors. Third, the way employees adapt to change as a result of IT implementation depends on the size of the organization. Based upon the findings, a series of benchmark metrics for benefits, costs, and risks of IT are presented. It is posited that these can serve as a reference point for initiating a quality evaluation cycle in which benchmarking forms an integral component of the strategic process. #

Purpose -The purpose of this research is to determine how project managers attribute information technology (IT) project success and failure. Design/methodology/approach -IT personnel from large Australian organisations completed an adapted version of the Attributional Styles questionnaire, which asked them to attribute causes along a number of attribution dimensions, for IT projects which have either succeeded or failed. Findings -The results indicate that IT support workers attribute failure to external factors, whilst attributing success to themselves. On the other hand, executive management took a more balanced perspective which attribute success to external factors and only partially to themselves, whereas they attribute significant personal responsibility for failure. Practical implications -More junior professionals and operational IT employees can learn from their senior professionals in attributing success and failure. Post-implementation reviews and debriefings conducted by senior IT professionals are ways of passing on their experience in relation to project and self-evaluations. Originality/value -This paper takes a well established psychology theory and applies it to the management of information systems (IS)/IT projects. IS/IT research has not examined how IT professionals attribute success and failure within projects.