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PurposeThe purpose of this article is to understand the relationship between emotional salience and workplace events related to technology change by using a combination of key features of two popular psychological theories – regulatory focus theory and affective events theory – to view the change process in diverse settings.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is based on analysis of 18 months of qualitative interview data (n=52 respondents) collected before, during and after the introduction of three different new technologies in three organizations – a hospital, a manufacturing facility, and a psychological counseling center. The mixed methods approach combined descriptive case studies and a structured coding approach derived from a synthesis of the two theories with which the transition processes at each organization were examined.FindingsEmployees with a so‐called promotion‐focused orientation were more likely to accept an IT change and the events related to it. Organizational cultures and the staging of events play a role in individuals' affective reactions and behavior. The use of the framework is promising for illuminating the role of emotions, the timing of change events, and subsequent behavior in response to organizational change.Research limitations/implicationsThe variety of types of organizations and job types represented, as well as the types of IT change proposed in each, provides a rich sample of diverse motivations and scenarios. Further development of the relationships between the timing of organizational events and regulatory focus is needed.Practical implicationsThe proposed framework suggests a shift in emphasis away from beliefs and towards emotionally relevant events. The findings suggest consideration of two distinct motivational aspects of both new and old technology. A peak in emotional events related to training indicates that an organization must actively manage how the plans, strategies, and communications with regard to training affect workers' beliefs and expectations.Originality/valueThe paper highlights how an emphasis on emotionally relevant events and attention to the regulatory focus involved in interpretation of those events could provide the basis for new approaches to organizational interventions. Interventions should focus on facilitating situations where individuals can frame relevant transition events with a promotion focus.

PurposeAs the shortage in the information technology (IT) workforce continues, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the cultural dimensions of IT occupations that attract or drive away potential IT professionals. In the present study, the authors take an occupational culture approach to study the cultural fit of newcomers to IT occupations and to understand how young people perceive the culture embedded in this occupational community as they become part of it.Design/methodology/approachThe authors take a sequential mixed methodology approach composed of two phases, one qualitative and the other quantitative. In the first phase of the study, nine focus groups and 27 interviews with college students were conducted to learn about the challenges and barriers that they personally experienced while becoming part of the IT occupational community. The second phase used results from the first qualitative phase to design a survey instrument that was administered to 215 IT college students who were currently or had recently been involved in IT work experience to evaluate their cultural fit to the IT occupational culture (ITOC) and its influence on their occupational commitment.FindingsThe results suggest that women, ethnic minorities and those with less work experience encountered greater difficulty fitting into different dimensions of ITOC. The results also showed that cultural fit is a good predictor of occupational commitment and affective commitment in particular.Practical implicationsAn initial survey instrument was developed to measure cultural fit to ITOC. This instrument can be further modified and adapted to be used in the hiring process by HR departments to measure cultural fit to organizational subcultures, such as the one in the IT occupational group.Originality/valueThis paper constitutes an important contribution to the rigor and development of the theory and research of human resources in information technologies.

Responding to new government regulations about reporting data, a social service agency decided to require caseworkers to use laptop computers extensively, taking these devices with them on calls to clients. The resistance of caseworkers to this mandate and this change provided an opportunity to examine the phenomena of technology resistance. Initially rooting the study in known models for examining technology resistance, researchers found the need to expand upon these models to acknowledge other social aspects, as well as individual aspects to alterations in work behavior. Perceiving that professional identity was at issue, the study employed concepts from Kling's social aspects of computing and Schein's career anchor theory, and used qualitative methods including an adaptation of Sacks's membership category analysis method from the field of ethnomethodology that led to insights about the underlying causes of IT resistance among social service workers. The originality of this micro-level approach lies in its ability to explore moral aspects of professional and personal identity. The approach revealed, in this situation, that workers' resistance was based particularly on a local history of organizational dysfunction in addition to elements such as performance and effort expectancy, attitudes, and anxiety that is typically discussed in the information technology acceptance literature.

The Internet, World Wide Web, and related information technologies, originally developed in Western countries, have rapidly spread to a great variety of countries and cultures. Many of these technologies facilitate and mediate interpersonal communication, an activity whose modes and means bind closely to cultural values. This article provides a theoretical integration of a framework for culture values together with a model for understanding privacy and related issues that arise when personal information is shared or exchanged using information technology. The resulting hybrid framework can help understand and predict individuals' culturally linked reactions to various communication‐related IT applications (e.g. e‐mail, e‐commerce sites, Web‐logs, bulletin boards, newsgroups) in diverse cultural contexts. An application of the framework to cultural settings in Middle Eastern nations concludes the article.