Keynotes

Arisa Shollo:


Leadership in the age of digital transformation: The emerging roles of the data scientists

Keynote by Arisa Shollo


As organizations go through digital transformation and organizational members engage with advanced technologies, a cascade of changes impact work and the workforce itself. On the one hand, we have new emergent human-technology configurations. On the other, new emergent organizational roles (e.g., data scientists) who take care of these configurations. However, we know little about the leadership of these new human-technology configurations and how leaders address technical and social aspects of change. Drawing upon insights from data scientists and their work, this keynote discusses the changing roles of data scientists from data analysts to managers, and their emergence as leaders, the skills and expertise they need to address the challenges of digital transformation, and how they motivate, engage and take good care of the emerging human-technology configurations. This keynote address aims at engaging the audience in a reflective discussion around these questions. Managing paradoxes, shifting value creation mechanisms, and employing crafting practices are some of the empirical observations that contribute to the current scholarly literature on leadership in the age of digital transformation. Finally, reflecting on these insights the keynote concludes by proposing research topics for IS scholars and discuss a potential future research agenda.

Arisa Shollo is an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School’s Department of Digitalization. Before joining academia she has worked as IT business and project portfolio analyst in the industry. This experience inspired her Industrial PhD project and studies – a collaboration between Danske Bank and CBS.

In her research she uses organizational, behavioural and cognitive concepts in order to better understand how organizations and decision makers use technologies, data and information in decision making processes. She has published her work in international journals such as Journal of Strategic Information Systems and Information Systems Journal and presented her work at a number of major international conferences, including Academy of Management, EGOS, NFMOC, ICIS and ECIS, IPDMC.

Jason Thatcher:

TECHNOSTRESS AND DIGITALIZATION: A CONFIGURATIONAL APPROACH TO EXPLAIN JOB BURNOUT AND JOB PERFORMANCE

Keynote by Jason Thatcher

As digitalization has transformed organizations, technostress has become a pervasive phenomenon and attracted substantial attention in information systems (IS) research and practice. To unpack how technostress impacts employee well-being in digitalized organizations, we build on general systems theory and qualitative interviews to argue that there are different types of interdependencies among technostressors that lead to technostrain. To account for these interdependencies and study how different intensities of technostressors combine to lead to technostrain, we apply a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to data drawn from 166 IS users over two time periods. We reveal four configurations, i.e. combinations of high and low technostressors, that lead to high job burnout and one that also leads to low job performance. We contribute to digitalization and technostress research by demonstrating that when the other technostressors are high, even a low technostressor can be the final straw so that the user experiences technostrain. Moreover, we identify that there are at least four types of interdependencies among technostressors can be found in digitalized workplaces and thereby demonstrate that it is necessary to adopt more sophisticated approaches to understand how technostressors lead to technostrain in digitalized environments.

Jason Thatcher is the Stauffer Professor in the Department of Management Information Systems of Temple University’s Fox School of Business. Before Temple, he was the MIS Endowed Faculty Fellow at Culverhouse College of Business at University of Alabama. Prior to Alabama, Thatcher was a Trevilian Fellow in the College of Business at Clemson University.

Thatcher studies individual decision-making, strategic alignment and workforce issues as they relate to the effective application of information technologies in organizations. His more recent projects focused on cyber security and social media. His work has been published in journals such as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of Applied Psychology and others. He serves as a senior editor at MIS Quarterly, a senior editor at the Journal of the Association of Information Systems and an associate editor at the European Journal of Information Systems. He has also served as the president of the Association of Information Systems.