The recent severity and frequency of cybercrime has been dominated by a single themethe COVID-19 pandemic. This research develops a multi-level influence model to explore how cybercriminals are exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic by assessing situational factors, identifying victims, impersonating trusted sources, selecting attack methods, and employing social engineering techniques. The model extends upon prior work on influence techniques and emotional appeals that cybercriminals employ, by bringing into sharper focus the role of situational factors in COVID-19 related cybercrime attacks. Content and thematic analysis was conducted on 185 distinct COVID-19 cybercrime scam incident documents, including text, images, and photos, provided by a global online fraud and cybersecurity company tracking COVID-19 related cybercrime. The analysis reveals interesting patterns about the sheer breadth and diversity of COVID-19 related cybercrime and how these crimes are continually evolving in response to changing situational factors. It is hoped that these insights and recommendations for end-users and organisations can contribute to a safer digital world as we cope with many other pressing challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Orientation: High turnover of information technology (IT) personnel is a major problem facing many global and local organisations. An increasingly important area of turnover research of IT personnel experiencing role stress involves examining their perceptions of supervisor support.Research purpose: This study aimed to examine the effects of role-related stress and supervisor support on job satisfaction, job performance and IT turnover intentions.Motivations for the study: It is important to assess from both a theoretical and a practical perspective the extent to which turnover can be explained by relational factors such as supervisor support.Research design, approach and method: An online voluntary survey yielded a sample of 163 respondents. Six constructs were measured: turnover intention, job performance, job satisfaction, supervisor support, role ambiguity and role conflict. A total of 158 usable responses were subjected to descriptive, correlation and regression analysis. Mediation and moderation effects were assessed using a multiple regression bootstrapping procedure.Main findings: Role ambiguity has a greater impact on job satisfaction than role conflict. Job satisfaction fully mediated the relationship between role stress and turnover intention. Supervisor support mediated the relationship between role stressors and job satisfaction and role stressors and job performance. There was no evidence in favour of a moderating role of supervisor support.Practical and managerial implications: Higher priority should be given to tackling role ambiguity. Supervisor support can increase job satisfaction, improve job performance and ultimately reduce turnover intentions, despite the presence of role stress.Contribution or value-add: Human resource managers and IT managers could use these results to improve job performance and staff retention.

Background: Marketers are interested in taking advantage of the capabilities of social media-based brand communities to develop long-term relationships with their customers. This research investigated the usage of a South African Facebook page to understand user attitudes and attendant pressures on users related to social norms and user loyalty.Objectives: The research investigated the extent to which perceived value, service quality and social factors influenced the customer’s intention to continue using a global motor vehicle firm’s social media-based online brand community (OBC).Method: We used an online voluntary survey to collect data from social media-based brand community members. In total, 303 responses were collected over a period of 4 weeks from a population of 3100 members. We analysed the relationship between trust, perceived responsiveness, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, social norms and the members’ intention to continue using the firm’s OBC. 293 usable observations were subjected to descriptive, correlation and regression analysis.Results: The age of the respondents varied from 18 to 58 years with a mean age of 32 years. Of these, 60% were men and 40% women. About 86.7% of the respondents reported having at least some form of tertiary education. The results of the multiple regression analysis indicate that service quality factors such as trust (25.5%) and social influence factors such as social norms (12.5%) explain a greater part of the variance in OBC continuance intention compared with utility factors such as perceived usefulness (18.2%). The effects for responsiveness and ease of use were not statistically significant.Conclusion: Social media-based brand communities are playing an important role in enhancing the overall trust relationship, value offering, sociality, knowledge and information sharing between customers and firms. Practitioners should note that the loyalty of customers using a firm’s social media-based brand community is still associated with customers’ historical trust in the branded goods or services, and real-world relationships with the firm and brand community members.

This paper examines the interrelationships between perceived usefulness, service quality and loyalty incentives on e-service continuance. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was adapted from the information systems (IS) literature and integrated with theoretical and empirical findings from prior marketing research to theorise a model of e-service continuance. Results from a survey of a financial healthcare’s e-service users indicate a positive relationship between perceived usefulness, service quality and loyalty incentives on continuance. Further analysis strongly suggest that continuance is determined solely by the higher perceived usefulness of the e-service while service quality is more effective at lower levels of perceived usefulness. Loyalty incentives did not moderate the relationship between perceived usefulness and continuance. Implications of these findings for firms contemplating e-service initiatives are discussed.

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Losing talented IT employees, the most critical strategic resource in IT, during a major organizational change can be catastrophic to the overall performance of the IS organization. This paper develops a multi-layered communicative-tension model of change-induced collective voluntary turnover from a historical case study analysis. A major organizational change at a healthcare insurance firm"s IT unit reveals the presence of three primary communicative tensions: alignment-autonomy, stability-change and expression-suppression. A group of employees, dissatisfied with the negative communicative practices employed by their managers in the midst of these communicative tensions, left the organization. A communicative-tension model of change-induced collective voluntary turnover complements and extends upon prior collective voluntary turnover research by accounting for the organizational change context and broader relational dynamics. This study offers practitioners important insights on how to manage communicative tensions during an IS organizational change to improve IT talent retention.

The debate ensues as to whether the traditional focus of computing research on theory development and verification and therefore has adequate immediate practical relevance. Despite increasing claims of the potential of design science research (DSR) to enhance the utility of the IT artifact and consequently practical relevance of research, many computing researchers seem to be reticent to accept this paradigm as a legitimate form of scholarly research. DSR is a relatively new paradigm in computing and little is known about its uptake in South Africa. In this paper, we investigate the opinions about DSR among South African computing scholars. Findings from a survey of 53 respondents indicate low adoption rates. The paper also investigates some of the key barriers preventing the uptake of DSR. The paper concludes with some implications as well as suggestions for building a local DSR community.

Despite recent technological advancements, the slow adoption pattern of digital healthcare promotion programs continues to be a major problem plaguing many healthcare organizations today. The historical teaching case study is indispensable in improving our understanding of the complex and multifaceted nature of contemporary digital healthcare promotion programs. This historical teaching case presents information about e-health, the e-commerce unit of a large multinational healthcare insurance company. The teaching case shows how despite e-health's ability to persuade a large registered base of users to trial its healthcare promotion programs, over 90% of these registrants discontinued use after a short trial period of using the technology. This historical teaching case focuses on the social challenges involved in persuading users to adopt and continue using e-health's major healthcare promotion innovation: an online nutrition center. Despite extensive promotions and the use of incentives, less than 10% of the user base adopted and continued to use this healthcare promotion innovation. The case reports on the discontinuance among digital healthcare promotion users despite the intensive efforts to retain them. Students and practitioners will gain insight into the key social challenges involved in achieving a critical mass of users for digital healthcare promotion innovations. The teaching case requires important decisions to be made by students and practitioners about present digital healthcare promotion programs by drawing on inferences from past digital healthcare promotion programs. Finally, this historical teaching case study makes a convincing case for the value of historical insights in informing present day challenges facing contemporary digital healthcare promotion programs.