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Personal information management effectiveness of knowledge workers: conceptual development and empirical validation

  • Empirical Research
  • Published:
European Journal of Information Systems

Abstract

What critical factors contribute to knowledge workers’ effective information management and consequent job performance? This paper begins to address this important question by developing a conceptual definition of a new construct called personal information management effectiveness (PIME) and its constituent dimensions. Specifically, we theorize that PIME consists of two underlying dimensions: personal information management motivation (PIMM) and personal information management capability (PIMC). Synthesizing the extant literature on information management and information orientation, we further conceptualize PIMM as having four sub-dimensions of proactiveness, sharing, transparency, and formality, and PIMC as possessing five sub-dimensions of sensing, collecting, organizing, processing, and maintaining. Moreover, we develop a theoretical model that positions PIME as a mediator between two selected individual characteristics (IT self-efficacy and need-for-cognition) and job performance. New measures for PIME dimensions were developed and shown to have strong psychometric properties. The proposed model was empirically tested using data collected from 352 knowledge workers. As theorized, PIME was found to have significant effects on job performance (41%) and fully mediate the effects that the selected individual characteristics have on job performance. Responding to recent calls for advanced research on personal information management, the measures of PIMM and PIMC developed in this study have practical value as research and diagnostic tools and the findings provide useful insights to help organizations improve knowledge workers’ information management practices.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the editors and reviewers for their helpful feedback on the earlier versions of this paper. For one of the authors, this work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MEST) (No. 2011-0029185).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Accountancy and MIS, Driehause College of Business, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, U.S.A.

    Yujong Hwang

  2. College of International Studies, Kyung Hee University, Yongin, Republic of Korea

    Yujong Hwang

  3. Management Information Systems Department, Fogelman College of Business and Economics, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA

    William J Kettinger

  4. Department of Knowledge Service Engineering, College of Information Science and Technology, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejoen, Republic of Korea

    Mun Y Yi

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  1. Yujong Hwang
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  2. William J Kettinger
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  3. Mun Y Yi
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Correspondence to Yujong Hwang.

Appendices

Appendix A

SeeTable A1.

Table A1 Measure development procedure
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Appendix B

SeeTable B1.

Table B1 Questionnaire items in main study
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Hwang, Y., Kettinger, W. & Yi, M. Personal information management effectiveness of knowledge workers: conceptual development and empirical validation. Eur J Inf Syst 24, 588–606 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejis.2014.24

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