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Bradley J. Alge is an associate professor of Management at Purdue University's Krannert School of Management. He received his Ph.D. in business administration from The Ohio State University, and an MBA from Kent State University. Professor Alge received his BBA from the University of Notre Dame, where he majored in MIS and was also a member of the 1988 Division I NCAA National Championship football team. Prior to entering academia, he worked as a consultant for Accenture. Professor Alge studies issues of human–technology interaction (e.g., electronic monitoring, virtual teams) and the effects of technology on individual and group attitudes and behaviors on the job. He has published in leading management and psychology journals including the Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

We present a model of organizational monitoring that integrates organizational justice and information privacy. Specifically, we adopt the position that the formation of invasiveness and unfairness attitudes is a goal-driven process. We employ cybernetic control theory and identity theory to describe how monitoring systems affect one's ability to maintain a positive self-concept. Monitoring provides a particularly powerful cue that directs attention to self-awareness. People draw on fairness and privacy relevant cues inherent in monitoring systems and embedded in monitoring environments (e.g., justice climate) to evaluate their identities. Discrepancies between actual and desired personal and social identities create distress, motivating employees to engage in behavioral self-regulation to counteract potentially threatening monitoring systems. Organizational threats to personal identity goals lead to increased invasiveness attitudes and a commitment to protect and enhance the self. Threats to social identity lead to increased unfairness attitudes and lowered commitment to one's organization. Implications for theory and research on monitoring, justice, and privacy are discussed along with practical implications.

Drawing on the HR technology (HRT) and information systems (IS) literatures, this study seeks to identify macro-level factors that influence the performance of HRT systems. A second objective is to assess the relative contribution that HRT goal realization makes to organizational satisfaction with HR services.

This investigation draws on a web-based survey of 169 US and Canadian firms targeting HR executives as key informants. Structural equation modeling (SEM) tested the roles that organizational support, capabilities and aspects of the environment play in technology goal attainment and collective satisfaction with HR services. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) evaluated the properties of several key scales and supported their usage. Moderated regression analysis further assessed whether HRT age influenced certain relationships.

As predicted, system goal realization was positively related to the level of support from an HRT champion and an HR innovation climate, while being negatively related to HRT mimetic isomorphism. HR service satisfaction, in turn, was positively related to HRT goal realization, the HR innovation climate and HR environmental munificence. It also was determined that HRT champions had a stronger positive impact on goal realization for younger technology portfolios. This too was expected.

External validity would be strengthened by not only increasing sample sizes for the USA and Canada, but also targeting more nations for data collection. The model's explanatory power may also be enhanced by improving the measurement of several predictors (e.g. top management support, absorptive capacity), as well incorporating constructs that focus on users (e.g. group potency, collective efficacy).

These findings underscore the need to proactively screen and structure the surrounding environment to facilitate portfolio success. Greater emphasis must be placed on (1) identifying and empowering HRT champions, (2) fostering an innovation climate in the HR function and (3) conditioning HRT purchases on “mindful” adoption. Doing so should not only increase the prospects of realizing goals, but also elevate satisfaction with HR services.

This is the first study to formally assess the effects that organizational and environmental context have on overall HRT systems performance. Prior research has focused on linking the local conditions of individual users to their perceptions and usage of HR technologies.

Conflict and resistance on the part of employees assigned to teams have accompanied the recent increase in the use of work teams in organizations. Previous empirical research identified several sources of employee resistance including violations of fairness, increased work‐load concerns, uncertain manager support, unclear role definitions, and lack of team member social support. From a literature review, we identified additional sources of employee resistance including trust, cultural values, and low tolerance for change. Empirically, we conducted a content analysis of 1,060 open‐ended comments of employees in two Fortune 50 organizations who were newly assigned to self‐managing work teams (SMWTs). The results suggest that employees' concerns did reflect issues of trust and low tolerance for change, but not cultural values. We discuss the implications of our findings for conflict management scholars as well as managers who are charged with handling increased conflict due to employee resistance to teams.

This paper presents a longitudinal experimental study on teams with the purpose of investigating the impact of communication media on decision‐making teams. The authors aims to achieve that by comparing face‐to‐face (FTF) and computer‐supported (CS) teams over a series of three sessions on three response variables: performance, cohesiveness, and synergy.

A total of 24 teams, each of five students, participated in three separate decision‐making sessions in which they solved a survival simulation scenario. Each team was randomly assigned to either face‐to‐face (FTF) or computer‐supported (CS) communication condition. The analysis compared overall means and mean patterns over time on the three response variables across the two communication media.

Results suggest that there were no differences in overall performance between CS and FTF teams and no differences in performance changes over time between the two media; there were no overall differences in overall synergy or synergy changes over time; and FTF teams reported higher average cohesiveness than CS teams, but cohesiveness improved at a faster rate in CS teams than in FTF teams. Overall these results suggest that the CS communication did not reduce the group's ability to work together. Moreover, the higher increase in cohesiveness reported by CS teams suggests that the ability to build relationships can increase over time.

Given the prominence of information technologies as a communication mechanism, the question of how team members in remote locations perform over time is of great theoretical and practical importance.

This study provides some preliminary evidence that computer communication does not significantly reduce the group's ability to perform over time for decision‐making tasks. CS teams report lower overall levels of cohesiveness which could indicate that some communication barriers might still limit the group's ability to build relationships.

A growing body of literature exists on virtual (i.e., geographically dispersed) teams; however, few summaries of this knowledge are available. The purpose of this paper is to help fill this gap by reviewing empirical research that addresses the effectiveness of virtual versus traditional (i.e., co-located) teams. Based on the typical input-process-output model of team effectiveness, we classify almost 200 empirical studies on virtual teams according to key dimensions of the model, including tasks and group characteristics, contextual factors, and supervisory behaviors. We develop propositions to address neglected research areas regarding the differences between virtual and traditional teams. There is still much to learn about virtual teams and how the physical dispersion of team members affects team effectiveness. It is our hope that our review and propositions will guide future research efforts and will help human resource professionals realize the potential for distributed teams in their organizations.