How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

The strategic use of deceptive language in managerial financial fraud is investigated with linguistic cues extracted from 202 publicly available financial disclosures. Those crafting fraudulent disclosures use more activation language, words, imagery, pleasantness, group references, and less lexical diversity than non-fraudulent ones. Writers of fraudulent disclosures may write more to appear credible while communicating less in actual content. A parsimonious model with Naive Bayes and C4.5 achieved the highest classification accuracy. Results support the potential use of linguistic analyses by auditors to flag questionable financial disclosures and to assess fraud risk under Statement on Auditing Standards No. 99.

Identification of fraudulent financial statements using linguistic credibility analysis

Exploring the communication breakdown in global virtual teams

Witnessing both opportunities and challenges in virtual work arrangements, researchers have explored a number of technological, social, and organizational factors in order to improve virtual work effectiveness. However, there is limited understanding of an important element of virtual work-the individuals. Our review of the literature indicates that the composition of individual knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) required to work virtually would benefit from further research. In this study, we theoretically and empirically develop the construct of individual virtual competence that captures the key KSAs required to perform effectively in today's virtualized workplace, within a parsimonious nomological network. Substantiated by its explanatory power on individual perceived performance and satisfaction, individual virtual competence contributes to the literature by acknowledging a distinct workplace competency that can be incorporated in future individual-level studies of virtual phenomena. This research provides managers with a lens to understand differences in individual work outcomes and provides a lever to developing individuals' capabilities so as to improve work outcomes.

Individual Virtual Competence and Its Influence on Work Outcomes

Increasingly, organizations are assessing their opportunities, developing and delivering products and services, and interacting with customers and other stakeholders digitally. Mobile computing, social media, and big data are the drivers of the future workplace, and these and other digitally based technologies are having large economic and social impacts, including increased competition and collaboration, the disruption of many industries, and pressure being put on organizations to develop new capabilities and transform their cultures. In this article, we provide a conceptual framework for the design of effective digital organizations. Our framework is predicated on the current state of digitization across diverse sectors of the global economy. In the digital world, all activities and transactions leave digital marks, and all actors, things, and places can be reached and affected digitally. As a result, we can design for self-organization rather than using hierarchical mechanisms for control and coordination. Such designs require the strategic and cultural alignment of digital technologies within the organization and externally with stakeholders. We propose that “actor-oriented” principles are at the heart of designing digital organizations and that, if properly applied, can result in a workplace where organization members are highly engaged and productive.

/pdf/designing-the-digital-organization-2m6q9hes3u.pdf

Designing the digital organization

The project management (PM) paradigm is rapidly shifting due to business globalization and information technology (IT) advances that support distributed and virtual project teams. Traditional PM focuses on a single project at a single location according to R. Evaristo and P. C. van Fenema (1999) and is more concerned with project inputs and outputs than with project process by J. R. Turner (2000). Management in the past implied projects were conducted with a top down view by K. J. Cleetus et al. (1996). The PM paradigm has begun to change due to the increasing number of distributed projects involving project collaborators from different locations, organizations, and cultures according to N. D. Jonsson et al. (2001). Current and future PM are more concerned with tracking project work processes and efficient and effective sharing of information and knowledge, among project contributors. High-levels of collaboration become essential for distributed project success. Task interdependence and member distribution across time, space, and technology make high degrees of collaboration necessary to accomplish project work. Adequate and timely sharing of information, and knowledge in all directions, proactive change management, and process monitoring are some of the important factors required for successful project collaboration according to F. Maurer (1996). In this article, we review problems associated with traditional PM scenarios, explain how collaborative PM can provide solutions, present a comparison of current commercial collaborative PM tools, and propose a collaborative PM architecture to address the challenges facing distributed projects teams.

/pdf/a-collaborative-project-management-architecture-3i2jd0zcw6.pdf

A collaborative project management architecture

Project management (PM) principles are rapidly changing due to business globalization and information technology (IT) advances which support distributed and virtual project teams. Traditional PM focuses on a single project at a single location and is more concerned with project inputs and outputs than with the project work itself. Traditional PM emphasizes scheduling, planning and tracking. The PM paradigm has begun to shift due to the increasing number of distributed projects involving team members from different sites, organizations and cultures. Current and future PM will be more concerned with project work and processes, and collaboration will become essential for success. Academics and practitioners have begun to discuss PM in terms of collaboration; however, there is little agreement as to a definition or interpretation of collaboration. One of the major changes in PM, over the last 25 years, has been the use of computerized tools and methods. In the future, the most significant change in PM may be the use of collaboration. In this article, we provide an explanation of different levels of collaboration, namely the communicative, collective, coordinated and concerted levels. Then we describe a prototype software package called C-PMS (Collaborative Project Management Software) to support 'concerted-level' collaboration among project team members. We believe that C-PMS, which supports all levels of collaboration, especially the concerted level, can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of project managers and team members.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicholas_Romano4/publication/221180626_Collaborative_Project_Management_Software/links/54db8e5a0cf2a7769d920123.pdf?disableCoverPage=true

Collaborative Project Management Software

1. INTRODUCTION Over the past decade, advancements in IT have driven an escalating industry trend toward the use of virtual teams to carry out virtual/distributed projects (Evaristo and Fenema 1999; Powell, Piccoli and Ives 2004). Evidence of this trend is the expanding market for "distributed" or "collaborative" project management software. According to a recent report, the market for distributed project management software is expected to increase from nearly 1 billion annually in 2002 to nearly 7.2 billion by 2007 (Collaborative Strategies 2004). In many cases, people use the terms virtual team and distributed team interchangeably. While both terms refer to the teams that rely heavily on computer-mediated communication (CMC), distributed teams have members who are geographically dispersed while a virtual team's members may be very close to one another. Virtuality can be viewed as a continuum with the amount of virtuality measured by the degree of dependence on CMC (Cohen and Gibson, 2003). A team that relies entirely on CMC is more virtual than the one that relies on a mix of face-to-face (FtF) communication and CMC for its interaction. If two teams rely on CMC to the same degree, the team with members on different continents is more highly distributed, but no more virtual than the team with members residing entirely within the same city or located on the same campus. Whereas a team is defined as a group of people working toward a common goal, teamwork refers to the process that the team employs to achieve that goal. It includes any individual or group activities that team members engage in towards completion of the team's objective. In this paper, virtual teamwork is defined as teamwork conducted via CMC regardless of team members' geographical location. Whereas a distributed team will almost certainly need to engage in virtual teamwork to complete its team goal, a collocated team may also need to engage in some amount of virtual teamwork due to team members' dispersion among different floors or buildings and the difficulties of scheduling FtF meetings. Virtual teams provides a variety of potential benefits to organizations by allowing them to secure resources from multiple locations, reduce travel expenses, and possibly generate synergy amongst diverse team members. Furthermore, virtual teamwork allows team members to work from anywhere and anytime that technology permits. As a result, virtual teams and virtual teamwork are pervasive organizational phenomenon. In fact, virtual teams and teamwork are becoming the norm and not the exception (Willmore, 2003, p. 5) Being able to engage in effective virtual teamwork is therefore an important vocational skill for IS professionals and knowledge workers in general. However, due to difficulties involved in communication and coordination, engaging in effective virtual teamwork is not an easy task (Bourgault, Lefebvre, Lefebvre, Pellerin and Elia 2002; Jonsson, Novosel, Lillieskold and Eriksson 2001; Powell et al., 2004). Because nonverbal or para-verbal communication cues are often absent from CMC, virtual team members may experience difficulty interpreting the meaning of messages and non-reply from their team members (Bordia, 1997; Crampton, 2001). In turn, degraded comprehension and increased misunderstanding results in group discussion, negotiation, and consensus building processes that are lengthy and ineffective in comparison to similar FtF interactions (Powell et al., 2004). Prior research has established that collocated teams regularly outperform virtual teams in regards to effective planning and efficient exchange of information (DeMeyer, 1991; Galegher and Kraut, 1994; Powell et al., 2004). Collocated teams may also develop strong interpersonal relationships more readily than virtual teams (Walther, 1996). A number of researchers have suggested interventions that can be employed to improve interpersonal relationship building and the overall performance of virtual teams. …

/pdf/incorporating-virtual-teamwork-training-into-mis-curricula-4joqdbwezz.pdf

Incorporating Virtual Teamwork Training into MIS Curricula

As part of an ongoing research program investigating features of computer-mediated communication (CMC) that affect deception and its detection, an experiment was conducted to test the impact of synchronicity on communication processes, credibility assessments, deception detection, and team performance. At issue is whether various forms of CMC enable or deter successful deception. Synchronous (real-time) CMC was hypothesized to foster more involvement and mutuality during communication, more credibility for team members, and hence less detection of deception when it was present. Team performance was hypothesized to suffer under deception due to deceivers capitalizing on synchronous communication to build their credibility. Two-person teams conducted a decision-making task in real time (synchronous) or over the course of several days (asynchronous). In half of the pairs, one party was asked to be deceptive. The results indicated that participants in the synchronous mode were more involved, perceived more mutuality, and viewed their partners in a more favorable light, than participants in the asynchronous mode. Deceivers portrayed themselves as somewhat more credible than truthtellers. However, they were not perceived as more persuasive than truth-tellers. Participants in the deceptive condition made poorer decisions than participants in the truthful condition. Implications for CMC and future study are discussed.

Deception and its Detection Under Synchronous and Asynchronous Computer-Mediated Communication

The project management (PM) paradigm has changed during the past decade due to the globalization of business and advancement of information technology (IT). Increasingly, projects involve members from different geographical locations more than at any other time in history. Traditional PM methods may be inadequate to manage distributed projects, and new information systems are needed to support distributed PM. This article provides the rationale for a collaborative PM approach to manage distributed projects and proposes a conceptual framework for the collaborative PM software development. The objective is to present a collaborative PM framework that can guide further research and development in this challenging area.

Fang Chen

Papers

A collaborative project management architecture

Collaborative Project Management Software

Incorporating Virtual Teamwork Training into MIS Curricula

Deception and its Detection Under Synchronous and Asynchronous Computer-Mediated Communication

A Collaborative Project Management Approach and a Framework for its Supporting Systems