Three publications at the ICIS!

This year, Professor Mirbabaie is present at the ICIS with three research papers.

Paper 1 deals with digital nomadism. With flexibility being an increasingly common aspect of many individuals’ career decisions and remote work more widely accepted, ‘digital nomadism’ has gained popularity. Thus, in this paper, Professor Mirbabaie, Marie Langer, and Julian Marx explore to what extent the label ‘digital nomadism’ is used and perceived as an employer branding signal in corporate work. Qualitative interviews indicate nomadic work is perceived as an attractive signal, though employers tend to use it internally to retain talent rather than to attract it externally. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework using signalling theory to put forth a notion of digital nomadism as an employer branding signal for talent attraction and retention.

Marx, J., Langer, M. & Mirbabaie, M. (2023). Understanding Digital Nomadism as an Employer Branding Signal. Proceedings of the ICIS 2023, Hyderabad, India.

Paper 2 discusses digital collaboration technologies and their effective use. While the affordance network approach has been developed and applied to understand the effective use of electronic medical record systems and fitness wearables, it does not consider social influences fostering or hindering effective use in collaborative settings. As a response, Professor Mirbabaie and his colleagues supplemented the affordance network approach for collaborative contexts. This paper demonstrates their approach based on two university courses in which students used the collaborative VR application Spatial for their group work.

Tölle, L., Slawinski, E., Fromm, J. & Mirbabaie, M. (2023). A Social Network Approach for Investigating Social Influences on Effective Use: Demonstration in Virtual Reality Collaboration. Proceedings of the ICIS 2023, Hyderabad, India.

Paper 3 examines the effects of conversational agents (CA) in digital labour. In the context of digital labour platforms and their anonymity, isolation, and lack of social interaction, implementing CAs could be a remedy by providing social presence and relatedness. However, research on human-to-human interaction highlights two counteracting effects of social presence: (1) social presence and relatedness induce enjoyment, and (2) social presence can create task pressure that reduces enjoyment. To explore this in-depth, Professor Mirbabaie and his colleagues conducted a three-condition online experiment on a commercial digital labour platform (n=269) regarding the effects of social presence. They showcase how social presence directly leads to relatedness and enjoyment and indirectly to task pressure. As this perceived task pressure does not reduce enjoyment and positively affects performance, introducing CAs seems to be a win-win situation for users and work.

Lichtenberg, S., Hildebrandt, F. & Mirbabaie, M. (2023). Under Pressure? – The Effect of Conversational Agents on Task Pressure and Social Relatedness in Digital Labor. Proceedings of the ICIS 2023, Hyderabad, India.