Suchergebnisse

Discusses the destabilizing impact on Southeastern Europe of NATO intervention in the Kosovo crisis in the form of widespread bombing of Yugoslavia, Mar. 1999; focus on increased flows of refugees to Albania and Macedonia and damage to the economies of Yugoslavia and all its neighbors.

In organizational settings, a communication dilemma exists whenever the interests of a collective (i.e., team, organization, interorganizational alliance) demand that people share privately held information, but their individual interests insteadmotivate them to withholdit. This article develops andtests an expectancy model that predicts specific conditions under which collective benefits can be made to converge with private ones, thus resolving communication dilemmas and motivating voluntary contributions to a collectively shared database. In the model, motivation is a multiplicative function of individual-level attitudes and beliefs: (a) organizational commitment; (b) organizational instrumentality, an instrumentality that links successful collective information sharing to broader organizational gain; (c) connective efficacy, an expectation that information contributedto the database will reach other members of the collective; and(d) information self-efficacy, the self-perceivedvalue of a contributor's information to other database users. The model was tested by a survey administered to members of an intact work team using a discretionary database. The multiplicative model was significant and explained sizeable amounts of variance in the motivation to contribute discretionary information. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. The model can be readily extended to predict information sharing by means of other communication media.

This article presents a public goods-based theory that describes the process of producing multifirm, alliance-based, interorganizational communication and information public goods. These goods offer participants in alliances collective benefits that are (a) nonexcludable, in that they are available to all alliance partners whether or not they have contributed, and (b) jointly supplied, in that partners' uses of the good are noncompeting. Two generic types of goods produced are connectivity, the ability of partners to directly communicate with each other through the information and communication system, and communality, the availability of a commonly accessible pool of information to alliance partners. Four types of alliances that can produce these goods are identified: (a) precompetitive, (b) competitive, (c) joint value creation, and (d) value chain. The article examines a variety of factors that influence the production of alliance-based connective and communal goods. Twenty-three integrated propositions are presented. The article concludes with an example of the application of the theoretical model to research on connectivity and communality provided through an alliance-based interorganizational communication and information system linking more than 50 alliance partners.