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Information technology changes rapidly, and the market trend flow changes even faster. The information systems (IS) department in a technological oriented environment has to ensure that the plans or solutions made by the IS department can align with organizational strategy to avoid resources waste, and adaptability is a crucial issue for an IS department too. This study believes that adaptability and alignment of the IS department are ambidexterity. The concept of knowledge use effectiveness (KUE), based on the human agency theory, proposed a research model mainly founded on intellectual capital, human agency theory, and contextual ambidexterity, and used intellectual capital (including human, structure and relational capital) as a framework to find the antecedents of knowledge usage.

This study conducts an empirical research method and collects 150 valid cases from the IS department employees in Taiwan.

The results of this study are: (1) KUE in an IS department significantly improves the ambidexterity; (2) intellectual capital has a positive influence on KUE; (3) despite human capital having no influence on iteration, iterational KUE has no influence on adaptability.

For academics, this study has developed KUE through a novel perspective and uses the concept of the human agency to articulate the characteristic of KUE, and thus has combined the intellectual capital, human agency and contextual ambidexterity into a research model. For managers, they should learn that KUE has a positive effect on the IS department ambidexterity, composed of alignment and adaptability. By knowing that, they can understand the concrete elaboration of KUE much better. Therefore, enhancing the process of knowledge usage can be a practical and useful way of improving an IS department performance.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the applications of big data in personal knowledge management (PKM).

Five conventional knowledge management dimensions, namely, the value of data, data collection, data storage, data application and data presentation, were applied for integrating big data in the context of PKM.

This study concludes that time management, computer usage efficiency management, mobile device usage behavior management, health management and browser surfing management are areas where big data can be applied to PKM.

While the literature discusses PKM without considering the impact of big data, this paper aims to extend existing knowledge by demonstrating the application of big data in PKM.

Abusive supervision has been a prevalent issue in the workplace. This study aims to explore the consequences of abusive supervision on employee affective organizational commitment and general health in the hospitality industry and further explores the boundary conditions of employee assistance programs (EAPs).

The participants of this study were 231 frontline employees from the hospitality industry in Taiwan. Quantitative data was collected using questionnaires from two time periods separated by a two-week interval. The data was analyzed using PROCESS macro for SPSS.

The findings from this study suggested that abusive supervision have negative impacts on both subordinates’ affective organizational commitment and general health. As expected, perceived effectiveness of EAPs moderated the relationship between perceived abusive supervision and affective organizational commitment, whereas the moderating effect of perceived effectiveness of EAPs on the relationship between abusive supervision and employee general health was not significant.

The results of this study showed that EAP practices can mitigate the negative effects of abusive supervision. It is expected to encourage managers in the hospitality industry to minimize or even prevent abusive supervision. Further, the authors suggest organizations implement specific strategies in their EAPs to assist employees in coping with the negative emotions accompanying abusive supervision.

This study offers empirical evidence that illustrates the importance of EAPs and how they may reduce the negative impacts of abusive supervision.

This research investigates whether and how perceived firm remorse (PFR) influences consumers’ coping behaviors in the digital media service recovery context. It also examines how an apology should be delivered to generate PFR.

In Study 1, 452 mobile application service users were recruited for a survey study, and Structural Equation Modeling was used to test the research hypotheses. In Study 2, 1,255 mobile application service users were recruited for an experimental study.

Study 1 shows that PFR negatively influences blame attribution and positively influences emotional empathy. Emotional empathy negatively affects coping behaviors. According to this study, blame attribution and emotional empathy do not have any serial mediation effect on the relationship between PFR and coping behaviors. Only emotional empathy mediates the effect of PFR on coping behaviors. Study 2 finds that response time and apology mode jointly influence PFR.

This research establishes the relationship between PFR and coping behaviors and shows the mediating role of emotional empathy in this relationship.

Service providers should consider response time and apology mode, as the two factors jointly influence the extent of PFR, which affects consumers’ coping behaviors through emotional empathy. A grace period, in which PFR does not decrease, is present when a public apology is offered. Such an effect does not exist when a private apology is offered.

This research explains how PFR influences coping behaviors and demonstrates how apology mode moderates the effect of response time on PFR in the digital media service recovery context.

The purpose of this paper is to gain a clear understanding of the impact of uncommon use of knowledge (adaptation and augmentation) on the performance of information systems (IS) departments, and to explore the effects of human-resources management (HRM) practices on uncommon use of knowledge.

A questionnaire-based survey was used to measure the constructs of the research model. A survey package was delivered to project managers or team leads and 133 responses were returned.

The empirical results indicate that knowledge adaptation has a significant effect on departmental performance, whereas knowledge augmentation is more important to innovation than to routine departmental performance. The results also show that, while knowledge adaptation can be enhanced by communication and an uncertainty-avoidance culture, knowledge augmentation is an outcome of shared decision-making, the use of teams, and innovation-based policies.

Given the positive impact of uncommon use of knowledge on IS department performance, future research should explore other factors besides HRM practices to boost it.

The results can serve as guidance for managers looking to select HRM practices to promote uncommon use of knowledge.

This study introduces knowledge adaptation and knowledge augmentation as the component processes of uncommon use of knowledge to the IS discipline, and empirically validates the antecedents and consequences of uncommon use of knowledge using survey data.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to develop a visualized search system utilizing graphical images to represent the story elements and concepts to help elementary students describe and seek their desired storybooks; and second, to explore the effect of the proposed visualized search system on elementary students’ tactics, success, and motivation for seeking storybooks.

A quasi-experimental approach was conducted with a sample of 61 elementary students in this study. The students’ tactics, motivation and the success of their storybook searching were addressed as dependent variables for further comparisons of the visualized searching system and a conventional keyword searching system.

The results revealed that the students in the experimental group exhibited more frequent tactics and greater motivation for storybook searching than those in the control group. Further χ² analysis indicated a significant relationship between the searching interface and the success of the students’ storybook searching.

This paper proposes a new visual search approach which allows young children to search for storybooks by describing an intended storybook in terms of its characters, objects, or the background colors of the cover page. The findings provide some evidence of the effectiveness of the visualized searching interface in terms of promoting young children’s learning through storybook searching and reading activities.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate psychological dimension, social dimension, and environmental dimension – six internet psychological characteristics (dissociative anonymity, invisibility, asynchronicity, solipsistic introjection, dissociative imagination, and minimization of status and authority), deindividuation, social influence (subjective norm and descriptive norm), and containment theory (inner containment and outer containment) – to propose an innovative model which can make up for deficiencies in previous studies of the toxic online disinhibition effect.

On the basis of 530 valid responses collected from an online survey questionnaire, partial least squares technology was used to examine the research model.

The result shows that dissociative anonymity has a significant impact on deindividuation and toxic disinhibition. In addition, asynchronicity and dissociative imagination have a direct effect on toxic disinhibition. Besides, in social influence, the authors found that subjective norm is a stronger predictor of toxic disinhibition than descriptive norm. Moreover, in containment theory, the result shows that inner containment can effectively reduce toxic disinhibition but not outer containment.

This study can provide academics and practical side empirical evidence as to what factor would cause toxic disinhibition and provides an innovative view regarding the relationship between social influence and containment theory on toxic disinhibition.

Teachers, students, librarians, scholars and domain experts often spend a lot of time and effort to select good and suitable textbooks. This study aims to propose and construct a computer-aided bibliometric system to rate textbooks. Through the software system designed here, the quality of every textbook can be easily and quickly known. This system will benefit both scholars and librarians.

Four methods were used to evaluate textbooks in this study, including: questionnaire recommendation analysis, dissertation citation analysis, library circulation analysis and bibliography analysis. The system architecture includes three subsystems: the textbook indexing and searching subsystem, the statistics added-value analysis subsystem and the citation report inquiry subsystem. An example demonstrates the usability and validity of the proposed method and system. The example uses surveying textbooks. The following percentages were used in the correlation calculation: textbook citation percentage (TCP), textbook library circulation percentage (TLP) and textbook recommend percentage (TRP).

There are three textbook assessment methods applied in this study, including: dissertation citation, library circulation and questionnaire recommendation. Dissertation citations for textbooks have a high correlation value with library circulation. The frequency correlation calculation was 0.7, while the TCP, TLP and TRP correlation calculation was 0.84. Therefore, the dissertation citation method can be accepted to evaluate textbooks effectively.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work related to evaluating surveying textbooks using a computer-aided bibliometrics system that can deal with large amounts of data and generate results quickly. This can be applied to other fields as well.

This study investigates factors that motivate social media users to retransmit rumors. We focus on everyday rumors rather than catastrophic rumors and develop a model of everyday rumor retransmission based on the uses and gratification theory, the rumor retransmission model, and the basic law of rumor.

An Internet survey is conducted to collect data and test the proposed model. This study’s hypotheses are tested through partial least squares regression analysis.

The results show that socializing, information seeking and status seeking increase the intention to retransmit rumors. Perceived rumor credibility has a moderating effect on the impacts of socializing and status seeking on retransmission intention.

Our research model provides a theoretical foundation for future studies that want to explore motivations or values that determine rumor-sharing intention on social media. The findings can help government agencies and businesses to manage rumor retransmission on social media.

The purpose of this study is to explore whether pension plan reporting readability affects earnings volatility. Moreover, as SFAS 158 requires firms to fully recognize their funded status on the balance sheet, the firms’ pension liabilities (inside debts) and financing ability have the corresponding change. This study further investigates whether pension plan reporting readability affects earnings volatility from the SFAS 158 and funded status perspectives.

This study follows Li (2008), Lehavy et al. (2011) and Rennekamp (2012) to use the FOG and SMOG variables as the readability proxies and investigates whether pension plan reporting readability affects earnings volatility from the perspectives of inside debts and SFAS 158 by using a sample of 3,077 American firms from the year 2006 to 2009.

Empirical results of this study show that firms with low readability of pension plan reporting have high earnings volatility, revealing that less readable pension plan reporting increases the assessed variance of a firm’s inside debts, financing flexibility, investment ability and therefore profitability. In addition, the implement of SFAS 158 enhances the effect of pension plan reporting readability on earnings volatility. Moreover, the authors also find that the funded status plays a moderating role for the effect of pension plan reporting readability on earnings volatility. Finally, the results are robust to endogeneity issue.

Earnings stability measures how consistently earnings have been generated over time, and its importance has been acknowledged by most firms. For example, prior literature has documented that manipulating financial reporting to smooth earnings is becoming a business common practice (Burgstahler et al., 2006; Liu and Espahbodi, 2014). The empirical results suggest that pension plan reporting readability is a significant determinant of earnings volatility.

As a practical implication, this study points out that manipulations of the pension reporting readability are not costless. It incurs the costs of earnings instability.

This study indicates that the issuance of SFAS 158 makes firms more likely to engage in pension plan readability manipulation. As a result, it has policy implication that the regulator should consider how the policy change alters the firm financial reporting behavior.

The empirical results suggest that firms may be more likely to engage in obfuscating pension plan disclosure after FASB’s issuance of SFAS 158. This would further increase outside investors’ assessed variance for inside debts and earnings volatilities. When policymakers require firms to recognize their funded status in statement of financial position, they should consider the costs or benefits that the firm manager face and, therefore, how this policy change alter the firm financial reporting behavior.