Organizational Systems and Technology: Technological, Educational, and Organizational Impacts of Global Crises Mini Track

This is the third time that the mini track on "Technological, Educational, and Organizational Impacts of Global Crises” is featured in the Organizational Systems and Technology track. This year, the mini track expanded its topical coverage to include broad-based emergencies beyond the pandemic focus of the prior two years. The mini track comprises five papers, two of which address technology's role in global crises, while the remaining three examine impacts of technology use during the COVID-19 pandemic. © 2023 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

Work-From-Home Performance During the Pandemic: How Technology Availability Moderates Job Role, Stress and Family-Work Conflict

Employees working from home (WFH) during the COVID-19 pandemic turned to an array of information and communications technologies (ICT) to support at-home job performance. This study documents the role of ICT in enabling these workers and managers to abruptly transition to WFH and explores the barriers and challenges they faced in working remotely. The goal of the study is to address the research question: How did ICT availability affect the relationship between personal work environment factors (i.e., job role, stress, and family-work conflict) and job performance while WFH due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic? We also report on how workers adjusted their ICT usage (hardware, software and Internet access) when moving to remote work. We then compare workers’ ICT usage, job performance, and personal stressors across manager and non-manager roles. Our findings from survey responses from 545 workers in 36 countries record a range of personal and professional challenges employees faced when forced to WFH, including whether employer ICT support has successfully met their needs. Our findings will inform employer efforts to establish new WFH policies. © 2022, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.

Understanding Customer Spending Behavior during COVID-19 Using Real-time Anonymized Data from Private Companies: An Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted the global economy at an unprecedented scale since its start in early 2020. Furthermore, it is estimated that a third of the workforce in the U.S. changed to work from home (Brynjolfsson et al. 2020). As consumers are spending more time at home, data shows that panic buying changed demand for items such as hand sanitizer and toilet paper. The increase for certain categories in consumer spending during the pandemic has been accompanied by a spike in the utilization of e-commerce channels. COVID-19 accelerated consumers move to purchasing goods online versus traditional physical stores by five years (Perez 2020). According to the U.S. Census Bureau, consumers increased their e-commerce spending to $211.5 billion during the second quarter, an increase of 31.8% quarter over quarter (Palmer 2020). The sudden nature of the changes related to COVID-19 purchase behavior makes it harder for marketers to respond effectively. As research on the topic of COVID-19 is starting to appear in the literature, there is not enough work in the area of consumer purchase behavior. In this paper, we utilize three real-time datasets to understand customer dynamics from March 2020 to December 2020 during the pandemic. Combining these data sources allows us to enhance our understanding of the general purchasing behavior at city level during the pandemic. We identify product categories that were the primary drivers of a sharp increase (decrease) in spending and the extent to which this increase (decrease) was maintained over time. We also shed light on stressors such as the number of COVID-19 cases and death by city and their impact on time spent at home and retail stores. By doing so, we contribute to the literature on panic buying which is still not well understood in the literature (Barnes et al. 2020). © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

How Working from Home during COVID-19 Affects Academic Productivity

The coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has forced most academics to work from home. This sudden venue change can affect academics' productivity and exacerbate the challenges that confront universities as they face an uncertain future. In this paper, we identify factors that influence academics' productivity while working from home during the mandate to self-isolate. From analyzing results from a global survey we conducted, we found that both personal and technology-related factors affect an individual's attitude toward working from home and productivity. Our results should prove valuable to university administrators to better address the work-life challenges that academics face.