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Individuals can improve their task performance by using information and communications technology (ICT). However, individuals who use ICT may also suffer from negative outcomes, such as burnout and anxiety, which lead to poorer performance and well-being. While researchers have studied the positive outcomes of ICT use in the aggregate, the same has not been done for negative outcomes.

This study uses a meta-analysis of 52 studies to examine the relationship between ICT use and negative outcomes, and the influence of job autonomy on ICT use and the negative outcomes of ICT use. Job autonomy is relevant because a higher level of job autonomy allows individuals to decide how, how often and when they will use ICT that is causing negative outcomes for their work.

The results of the meta-analysis revealed that ICT use increased negative job outcomes and that, unexpectedly, autonomy exacerbated this effect.

The results of this study point to the prevalence of negative outcomes from ICT use among individuals. Researchers should study how users may potentially restrict the value that organizations may be able to obtain from the implementation of new systems, especially whether individual-level negative outcomes could coalesce into a collective resistance. There also needs to be further research into the motivating and inhibiting roles of autonomy in enhancing ICT use, while mitigating its negative impacts simultaneously.

The study provides an aggregate analysis of the negative impacts of ICT use among individuals and the role of autonomy in the relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating effect of job autonomy on the relationship between direct supervisor’s transformational leadership behaviors and employees’ extended use of information technologies (IT). In addition, this study considers IT innovativeness as a significant moderator in the research model, in order to examine if the relative influences of leadership behaviors on IT extended use are contingent upon employees’ IT innovativeness.

A field survey was conducted in China and empirical data were collected from 299 employees who use IT in support of daily work. Structural equation modeling technique was used to examine the research model and corresponding hypotheses.

The empirical results indicate that: three dimensions of transformational leadership, specifically interpersonal consideration, intellectual stimulation and inspirational motivation, are significant antecedents of employees’ IT extended use; perceived job autonomy partially mediates the relationships between transformational leadership behaviors and IT extended use; and employees’ IT innovativeness positively moderates the effects of transformational leadership behaviors on IT extended use.

This study can provide first-line managers with a better understanding of how to stimulate employees to make an extended use of IT by granting them more freedom in job assignments. Furthermore, the managers also need attend to subordinates’ personal IT innovativeness when exhibiting transformational leadership behaviors.

This study contributes to the extant literature of IT extended use through the lens of transformational leadership and job characteristics theory. In particular, this study identifies the boundary condition of the proposed research model by uncovering the moderating effect of IT innovativeness between transformational leadership behaviors and IT extended use.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between the strategic development of subsidiaries and the likelihood of subsidiaries exporting on an intra‐regional basis to European markets.

The paper defines the strategic development of subsidiaries as increases in autonomy, embeddedness in host locations and use of networks and host country sourcing. The location of subsidiaries in industrial clusters is also considered. Use is made of multinomial probit analysis of a survey of 391 UK‐based subsidiaries to identify the relationships between the strategic development of subsidiaries and supplying European markets.

The study finds some evidence that there are links between increasing networks and supplying European markets, but there is no evidence that developing host country sourcing is associated with European supply. Location in an industrial cluster is consistently associated with supplying European markets, and autonomy also appears to be closely associated with supplying European markets.

Extension of the research is required to other regional trade blocs such as Mercosur and North American Free Trade Agreement. The role of networks and the links to location in industrial clusters require further exploration, and future research needs to include the services and knowledge‐intensive sectors.

The paper adds to the understanding of subsidiary development in the context of intra‐regional trading and thereby expands the literature on the regional strategy of multinationals. It highlights the importance of different types of autonomy for encouraging intra‐regional trade by foreign‐owned subsidiaries, and the central role of location in industrial clusters.

This paper presents an evaluation of a commercially available intelligent search agent for the Internet. Search robots and search engines can be of great help in finding information on the Internet, but their different features and sometimes their unfriendly interfaces can be confusing. Some expect that intelligent search agents could solve these problems. But most of these applications are not yet on the market, and the few that are: do they really perform? One of the few commercially available search agents is Autonomy, from Autonomy Corporation. Its concept is promising to professional users: the natural language processing of the query, the take‐over of repetitive jobs, an integrated interface for searching and managing information, and the sharing of knowledge with other users. The test in this article, however, reveals that the product is not yet ready to challenge the Internet search indexes which, in the test cases, perform better than Autonomy does with regard to recall and precision of information retrieval. Moreover, Autonomy does not give enough feedback to control the search action.

This paper investigates whether changes in autonomy and embeddedness in host locations by foreign owned subsidiaries are associated with improvements in performance by subsidiaries. The results provide evidence that increasing operational decision‐making autonomy is associated with enhanced performance as measured by both subjective and more objective measures of performance. The results on the importance of increasing strategic decision‐making autonomy and embeddedness are less clear, with improved performance being detected in some cases, but only for the subjective measure of performance.

Previous studies have demonstrated that an autonomy-supportive supervision style is associated with improved well-being and positive behaviours for supervisees. However, autonomy-supportive training (AST) has yet to be tailored to suit supervisors in low-skilled occupations for whom traditional pedagogical approaches may be inappropriate. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development and preliminary evaluation of AST for these supervisors, using self-determination theory (SDT) and andragogical principles of adult learning.

SDT and andragogical principles were systematically integrated to develop (a 3 h) AST programme. The training sessions were trialled with 11 first-line supervisors in New Zealand as a preliminary evaluation of AST. The evaluation used open-ended questions following Kirkpatrick’s evaluation model and incorporated the trainer’s reflections.

Supervisors found AST relevant, easy to understand and suited to their approach to learning. Trainer’s reflections also provided insight into the challenges in conducting such training for supervisors in low-skilled occupations and the article makes suggestions to address these challenges.

AST can be successfully tailored to first-line supervisors, indicating that an autonomy-supportive style of leadership is relevant for those employed in low-skilled occupations. This initial evaluation provides a foundation for future studies to conduct higher-level assessment of AST.

AST can be utilised to provide first-line supervisors with access to improved leadership development opportunities. Challenges of conducting this kind of training programme in a context of low-skilled occupations are addressed and recommendations made for organisations and trainers.

This study is novel as it demonstrates the development of AST, a leadership skills training, tailored to suit the needs of an understudied group, supervisors in low-skilled occupations.

An examination of the research literature suggests that no attempt has been made to examine learner autonomy development within female university-level English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Given that English has become the world’s predominant lingua franca for academia, business, and politics, the purpose of this paper, therefore, is to fill this gap in the literature.

This is a qualitative case study that aims to explore learner autonomy in vocabulary development.

The results showed that teachers are cognizant of the concept of learner autonomy. However, they are not all certain of the benefits of autonomous vocabulary learning. This study reveals how six adult learners’ levels of autonomy are highly influenced by their teachers’ practices. This study draws out suggestions for English language teachers who promote learner autonomy theory and practice. It also offers specific guidance, models, and adapted learning approaches of how to promote autonomy inside the classroom.

This study encountered several limitations. The first is time: the study took place over the course of two months in the Summer of 2016, when students were fully encumbered with schoolwork and social duties. The recruitment of participants during that time was a challenge. Some of the students who agreed to participate in the study were not fully engaged in the research. Additionally, the study faced difficulties with faculty commitment – one of the professors delayed the interview session multiple times and perceived some of the interview questions negatively. In addition, Dickinson’s (1993) characteristics of learner autonomy are largely related to the opportunities that are presented to the students by the teacher. It appears that Dickinson’s scale was meant to be used to identify students’ level of autonomy, particularly inside the classroom. However, because of some of the examples of activities pertaining to how they learned vocabulary outside the classroom, they were not related to classroom teaching. Also, the number of the participants is limited in this study.

A future study could be undertaken to measure and quantitatively analyze learners’ vocabulary development on a larger scale. Research could also be conducted using a pretest, an intervention, and a posttest to measure the effectiveness of learning vocabulary autonomously. In addition, other pedagogical approaches could be utilized to measure EFL students’ intrinsic motivation and autonomy, which play critical roles in learning. Allowing learners to self-select their preferred method of learning can help them to develop their vocabulary knowledge. The findings from this study reveal that learner autonomy plays a significant role in enhancing EFL students’ vocabulary development.

When students learn vocabulary autonomously, they are better able to source the lingua franca’s core pronunciation of a word and its spelling without the influence of the teacher’s cultural background. Given the magnitude of teachers’ workloads, they may lack the time for designing lessons that adequately meet the needs of diverse learners. Therefore, the practical way to ameliorate the problem of inadequate time is to provide them with methods (e.g. using strategies such as inquiry-based learning, problem-based learning, and project-based learning) that they can use to more readily foster learner autonomy.

The cross-cultural significance of autonomy within self-determination theory is divisive on universal significance. This paper aims to report a sequential exploratory mixed methods study conducted to construct and validate a scale to investigate how, in Malaysian context, the construct of autonomy is conceptualized in comparison with the existing scale owing to cultural variation.

Focus group interviews identified dimensions of autonomy support that were specific to Malaysian culture and guided the development of the survey and construct validation was done using structure equation modeling.

The results show that the proposed scale has satisfactory psychometric properties, and the hypothesized model had a good fit to the data. The new scale produced four dimensions of teacher autonomy support, namely, responsible, approachable, shows respect and conveys confidence, with three items in each dimension. Malaysian secondary school students’ perception of autonomy support was found to be distinctive from the traditional measure.

Implications for teachers are discussed for culturally meaningful interpretation of the autonomy construct for classroom teaching practices.

Although researchers have proposed a shift in digital divide studies toward a focus on Internet use and skills, it is still relevant to talk about access as autonomy of use, as some individuals in both developing and developed countries still face barriers and do not have the freedom to choose how to connect to the Internet.

We look at the relationship between autonomy of use and online interaction with government and the relationship between the latter and individuals’ perceptions of the government. Data for this study was collected in 10 cities in Colombia between August 29 and September 17 of 2012 and represented Colombia’s urban adult population.

Results showed that autonomy of use had a positive relationship with online interaction with government. This online activity was positively related with individuals’ trust in government and negatively with perceptions of government corruption.

Findings suggest that certain uses have a higher probability of emerging as individuals’ environments become saturated with a broad set of connectivity options. Redundant efforts to increase connectivity can be valuable in assisting internet users. Public policy projects focused only on one access alternative might not be as beneficial as those that facilitate more varied types of Internet use. Additionally, the results could be interpreted to mean that that those high-trust individuals who perceive the government as less corrupt, tend to interact online more with it because they are part of an elite which has benefited from the government in some way.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for reconceptualising research on school autonomy to redress the limitations of traditional research, strengthen the conceptual links between school autonomy and learning outcomes and offer a range of new strategies for studying the interplay of school autonomy, leadership and learning.

Based on a review of international studies and the findings of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Teaching and Learning International Study (TALIS), the conceptual limitations of and gaps in traditional research on school autonomy in relation to leadership and learning are discussed, and their implications for the development of a new framework are outlined.

The conceptual limitations of traditional research on school autonomy are as follows: internal school autonomy is insufficiently differentiated; too little attention is paid to cultural autonomy and internal structural autonomy at individual and group levels; autonomy is measured only as perceived by principals, with no attention to the perspectives of other key stakeholders; and conceptual links between school autonomy and learning outcomes are missing, leading to inconsistent findings on the effects of school autonomy on student learning. To redress these limitations, a new framework for research is developed. School autonomy is reconceptualised as a combination of functional autonomy, structural autonomy and cultural autonomy. Leadership is also reconceptualised by categorising three types of leadership activity: leadership for functional initiatives, leadership for structural initiatives and leadership for cultural initiatives. This categorisation may help to strengthen conceptions of the relevance of leadership to autonomy and performance in future research.

A typology of research strategies is developed to broaden the possibilities for implementing the reconceptualisation framework. A single-component strategy, a two-component strategy, an interaction strategy and a holistic case-study strategy are presented. Depending on the research purposes and the available resources, one or a combination of these strategies can be used to conceptualise the study of school autonomy, leadership and performance.

The new ideas and perspectives associated with the reconceptualisation framework will contribute to future research in this area on an international scale. Future PISA, TALIS and similar studies will also benefit from this reconceptualisation.