Employees’ collaborative use of green information systems for corporate sustainability: motivation, effort and performance

ABSTRACT

Green information system (GIS) innovation plays an important role in corporate sustainability, especially for the organizations in emerging economies that face both economic and environmental pressures. To support Sustainable Development, employees need to work together on tasks using all kinds of GIS functions like online collaboration and electronic workflow. Most researchers examine GIS implementation and usage at either the organizational or individual level, but few have studied the phenomenon from the perspective of technology-enabled collaboration. This study investigates the motivation, effort and performance of collective GIS use at the operational level. In addition, strategic-level variables including GIS Strategy, Green Image and Competitive Advantage are included in the research model. Results based on survey observations collected from China and USA support hypothesized relationships and reveal interesting cross-country differences. GIS Strategy provides overarching guidance on GIS-enabled collaboration, which yields long-term effects on Green Image and Competitive Advantage. The findings provide helpful insights on the best practices to promote GIS-enabled collaboration for corporate sustainability in countries and regions at different development stages.

KEYWORDS:

• Green information systems
• collaborative technology use
• corporate sustainability
• organizational strategy
• Environmental Performance
• Green Image

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Zhaojun Yang is an associate professor in The School of Economics and Management at Xidian University, China. He received a PhD in Management Information Systems and a Master Degree in Computer science from Northwestern Polytechnical University, China. His research interests include green IS, SaaS and e-commerce. He has published more than 30 papers in journals like Information Systems Frontiers, Journal of Computer Information Systems, Computers in Human Behavior, International Journal of Mobile Communications. He is also a consultant to a number of computing SME based in Central China.

Jun Sun is a professor of information systems at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He received his doctoral degree in Information and Operations Management from Texas A&M University. Some of his recent publications can be found in Communications of the ACM, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Journal of Computer Information Systems, Industrial Management & Data Systems, Computers in Human Behavior, Computers & Education, Communications of the Association for Information Systems, and Health Policy.

Yali Zhang is an associate professor at Northwestern Polytechnical University, China. She received a PhD in Management. Her research interests include social media, green IT/IS management, and organization behavior. Her work has appeared in Computers in Human Behavior, Journal of Computer Information Systems, International Journal of Services and Standards.

Ying Wang is a lecturer of information systems at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where she received her PhD. Her work has appeared in Communications of the AIS, Journal of Computer Information Systems, Computers in Human Behavior, Industrial Management & Data Systems, Proceedings of International Conferences on Information Systems and Proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

Lisha Cao is a Master’s program student in The School of Economics and Management at Xidian University, China. Her research interests include Green IS and e-commerce.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China [No. 15BGL040] and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [No. JB160608] awarded to the first author.