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Political skill has emerged as a concept of interest within the information systems literature to explain individual performance outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to adapt political skill to technology-mediated contexts. Specifically, the authors seek to understand political skill's role in shaping microtask workers' opportunity recognition when utilizing online communities in microtask work environments.

The authors tested their research model using a survey of 348 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers who participate in microtask-related online communities. MTurk is a large, popular microtasking platform used by thousands of microtask workers daily, with several online communities supporting microtask workers.

Technology-based political skill plays a critical role in shaping the resources microtasking workers rely upon from online communities, including opportunity recognition and knowledge sharing. The ability to develop opportunity recognition positively impacts a microtask worker's ability to leverage online communities for microtask worker performance. Tenure in the community acts as a moderator within the model.

The present study makes several contributions. First, the authors adapt political skill to an online community to account for how microtask workers understand a community's socio-technical environment. Second, the authors demonstrate the antecedent role of political skill for opportunity recognition and knowledge sharing. Third, the authors provide empirical validation of the link between online communities and microtask worker performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how participation in an online health community provides for direct benefits in the form of information utility and social support and an indirect influence on perceptions of patient empowerment.

A multi‐method approach was conducted involving interviews with moderators of 18 online health communities and a field survey of 153 online health community participants.

Online health community participation leads to direct benefits in the form of information utility and social support and that information utility also helps to shape perceptions of patient empowerment among community participants.

This research calls into question the role of online health communities as a support mechanism to empower patients to take ownership over their healthcare treatment. Online health communities support the development of patient empowerment by creating and disseminating information that can be used to gain an understanding of a patient's health condition.

Purveyors of online health communities must be able to ensure a high level of engagement among community participants that allows for each member to elicit outcomes such as information utility, while simultaneously guarding against undesirable circumstances that may prohibit a positive experience.

Medical professionals can utilize the results of this study to develop strategies for incorporating online health communities into patient care. Specifically, medical professionals can use these results to identify relevant communities and engage in information sharing to ensure relevant and accurate information is disseminated to patients as they seek out information concerning their health conditions.

As an ever growing segment of the population looks to online health communities for health information seeking and emotional support, we still know very little as to the type of support that is provided by these forums and how benefits obtained from participation help to shape patient empowerment outcomes. This study determined that information utility and social support are two benefits obtained by online health community participants and that information utility also helps to shape perceptions of patient empowerment among community participants.

This research investigates how the value creation interests and activities of different stakeholder groups within one open source software (OSS) project influence the project's development over time.

The authors conducted a case study of OpenSimulator using textual and thematic analyses of the initial four years of OpenSimulator developer mailing list to identify each stakeholder group and guide our analysis of their interests and value creation activities over time.

The analysis revealed that while each stakeholder group was active within the OSS project's development, the different groups possessed complementary interests that enabled the project to evolve. In the formative period, entrepreneurs were interested in the software's strategic direction in the market, academics and SMEs in software functionality and large firms and hobbyists in software testing. Each group retained its primary interest in the maturing period with academics and SMEs separating into server- and client-side usability. The analysis shed light on how the different stakeholder groups overcame tensions amongst themselves and took specific actions to sustain the project.

The authors extend stakeholder theory by reconceptualizing the focal organization and its stakeholders for OSS projects. To date, OSS research has primarily focused on examining one project relative to its marketplace. Using stakeholder theory, we identified stakeholder groups within a single OSS project to demonstrate their distinct interests and how these interests influence their value creation activities over time. Collectively, these interests enable the project's long-term development.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the social media (SM) tools that are the most prevalent for project management activities, ascertain the areas of project management that are most benefited by SM, elucidate enablers and inhibitors to adoption of SM and identify the implications for virtual teams.

A Delphi study was used to explore why and how SM is being utilized in projects. In total, 32 participants contributed to three rounds of Delphi study, comprising two rounds of questionnaire followed by confirmatory interviews. The vulnerabilities and difficulties associated with the use of SM were examined by qualitative interviews.

Information sharing SM tools, such as YouTube, Dropbox, SlideShare, flickr, CrowdStorm and Instagram, are the most advantageous to project management. However, the tools utilized differ at different stages of the project lifecycle. The major benefit of SM is that it enables project teams to communicate efficiently and positively affects virtual team dynamics. Adoption can be inhibited by the absence of infrastructure in rural areas and differing preferences for SM tools in global regions. There is also a perceived lack of maturity of policies and procedures to govern SM adoption and use.

The research was conducted based on the Project Management Body of Knowledge version 5 project management processes.

The findings will enable practitioners to select SM tools that are suitable for project activities and forewarn about potential shortfalls. The findings also facilitate a qualitative analysis of SM attributes and their effect on project management.

Project practitioners can use the findings to adopt SM for their project management.

This study extends the literature concerning the use of SM for project management, provides a foundation for future research and may present as a useful guide for the adoption of relevant SM tools.

The research aims to measure the effectiveness of collaborative learning exchanges transpired through digital tools and technologies (DT&Ts) employed by the mentor universities during the COVID-19 pandemic by conducting an empirical study on undergraduate students in Indian higher educational institutions (HEIs) under the mentorship program based on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative. The pandemic scenario, its impact on the mentor university's social responsibility and the way DT&Ts can assist are investigated in this article.

The interactions with experts and students were conducted to explore the DT&Ts for learning exchanges. Next, structural equation modeling (SEM) was performed to validate the model and perform regression analysis. The quantitative data collection was made through questionnaires during the second deadly wave of COVID-19 that hit India.

The independent variables (IVs) such as the IT infrastructure support (IT_IS), virtual collaborative tools (VCTs) and future-oriented technologies (FOTs) have a significant impact on the CSR learning outcomes (CSR_LOs) of undergraduate students under the mentorship program. However, IV research instruments for innovation could not make a significant effect.

The IVs IT_IS, VCTs and FOTs influence the CSR_LOs, while RII does not have an influential impact.

As the online learning environment is expected to stay at least in a blended form, adequate CSR funding in infrastructure is necessitated to harness the full potential of this important resource, technology. The results of this empirical investigation affirm that IT_IS, VOTs and FOTs significantly impact CSR_LOs during the crisis. The study findings would encourage the mendtor universities and their stakeholders, including the mentee universities, to evolve and create an ecosystem for effective management of these resources to attain positive outcomes. The study findings can guide the mentor universities in managing uncertainties like pandemics and effectively using the earlier-mentioned critical resources for social responsibility. This research also allows the development of future applications adnd models in mentor-mentee universities for social responsibility, post-pandemic transformation and resilience.

The DT&Ts came to the immediate rescue during the pandemic and positively affected collaborative CSR_LOs by the mentor universities, but they have not evolved to a level where offline learning can be replaced entirely. Hence, it can be inferred that a hybrid model is preferable. The study also improves the understanding of how DT&Ts are being harnessed to aid collaborative learning in fulfilling the mentors' CSR in fatal emergencies. The purpose is to equip the education system through mentorship so that universities can sustain, innovate and grow even in trying times. Also, it discusses the dynamics of various DT&Ts for creating a sustainable learning environment and utilizing them to make the teaching prolific and influential.

There is a scarcity of literature regarding the learning outcomes realized through CSR initiatives and collaboration between mentor-mentee institutions. There is a need to understand how these knowledge exchanges continued despite the physical restrictions during the pandemic. In this direction, this study helps to understand how the DT&Ts played a critical role in continuing learning and keeping abreast in a knowledge society from the perspective of resource-based view (RBV) in these precarious situations.

The study aims to understand how corporate social responsibility (CSR) and happiness are used together in various research studies to serve the ultimate goal of corporate sustainability (CS), which in turn contributes to sustainable development.

A systematic literature review (SLR) was made using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) method in the two most-reputable databases of Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, revealing a final list of 54 studies to analyse.

The review concludes that the literature on CSR and happiness provides three main findings: first, concerning the pillars of sustainability, most of the studies concentrate on people, neglecting the planet and profit, second, employees are subject to the highest number of studies as the target of CSR initiative and third, almost all studies employed the hedonic aspect of happiness in CSR literature.

This particular research finding points to the need for developing a comprehensive framework to assess stakeholder happiness from both hedonic and eudaimonic aspects from a CSR perspective which is then represented under the three pillars of sustainability.

To contribute to the ultimate goal of CS, management would design CSR initiatives for all stakeholders to increase both hedonic and eudaimonic happiness of them.

The literature provides reviews of research in CSR and happiness separately; however, there is not any research revealing how these two concepts are used together in studies and how this association could be read to serve the goal of CS.

Through a comprehensive review of the literature on open innovation (OI), this study aimed to achieve two objectives: (1) to identify the main thematic areas discussed in the past and track their evolution over time; and (2) to provide recommendations for future research avenues.

To achieve the first objective, a method based on text mining was implemented, with the analysis focusing on 1,772 journal articles published between 2003 and 2018. For the second objective, a review based on recent and relevant papers was conducted for each thematic area.

The paper identified nine thematic areas explored in existing research: (1) context-dependency of OI, (2) collaborative frameworks, (3) organizational dimensions of OI, (4) performance and OI, (5) external search for OI, (6) OI in small and medium-sized enterprises, (7) OI in the pharmaceutical industry, (8) OI and intellectual property rights, and (9) technology. The analysis of the most recent papers belonging to the more investigated areas offers suitable suggestions for future research avenues.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no review has yet been undertaken to reorganize the OI literature.

To obtain optimal deliverables, more and more crowdsourcing platforms allow contest teams to submit tentative solutions and update scores/rankings on public leaderboards. Such feedback-seeking behavior for progress benchmarking pertains to the team representation activity of boundary spanning. The literature on virtual team performance primarily focuses on team characteristics, among which network closure is generally considered a positive factor. This study further examines how boundary spanning helps mitigate the negative impact of network closure.

This study collected data of 9,793 teams in 246 contests from Kaggle.com. Negative binomial regression modeling and linear regression modeling are employed to investigate the relationships among network closure, boundary spanning and team performance in crowdsourcing contests.

Whereas network closure turns out to be a negative asset for virtual teams to seek platform feedback, boundary spanning mitigates its impact on team performance. On top of such a partial mediation, boundary spanning experience and previous contest performance serve as potential moderators.

The findings offer helpful implications for researchers and practitioners on how to break network closure and encourage boundary spanning with the establishment of facilitating structures in crowdsourcing contests.

The study advances the understanding of theoretical relationships among network closure, boundary spanning and team performance in crowdsourcing contests.

There is growing interest in innovative online problem-solving models such as crowdsourcing to serve individuals, firms and the society as a whole. Crowdsourcing is the combination of efforts from various sets of individuals who are either volunteering or working part-time for socioeconomic production, basically in the cyber world. This hybrid work model is already in use by businesses and entrepreneurs; some of the platforms include Amazon mechanical Turk, 99designs, Hit RECORD and Design Crowd.

Much has been parleyed and published, and this is primarily because of the efficient socioeconomic potentials crowdsourcing offers.

This paper addressed the following three questions to help have a better understanding of crowdsourcing: who can perform crowdsourcing? why it is relevant to crowdsource in this present proliferated internet age and if there are going to be some changes in the future and the last but not the least what can be done to promote it in the society?

This paper discusses the three W’s and concludes with challenges facing the crowdsourcing work model.