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financial performance i.e., quality of creative work and employee engagement before we state hypotheses on the financial results.
2.1. Effect on the Quality of Creative Work
Traditional monitoring and incentive systems can be useful means of setting expectations and evaluating employees in tasks and goals that can be explicitly stated. However, customer-focused
service organizations that require employees to apply discretion and creativity to do their job are often unable to specify in advance all the tasks and processes employees should follow and the
goals they should attain to engage and serve customers effectively Banker et al. [1996]. Much of the information on which empowered employees make decisions is idiosyncratic Campbell,
Erkens, and Loumioti [2014]. To be effective, empowered employees need to rely on tacit knowledge, which is know-how that is difficult to transmit through explicit means and which can
only be obtained through engaging in practical activities, interacting with mentors, and observing how experienced colleagues incorporate idiosyncratic information on a regular basis into their
decisions and actions Polanyi [1966], Tsoukas [2003]. For two reasons, ISSCs have the potential to overcome some of the limitations that traditional
management control systems have in guiding and motivating empowered employees to use their local expertise to experiment with new ways to conduct their job. First, ISSCs can expose
employees to a broader and more diverse pool of ideas from their peers, helping them acquire tacit knowledge or domain-relevant skills that could enhance their jobs. Organizational
knowledge creation theory states that employees who are exposed to other people’s ideas are encouraged to reflect on their own practices and are more likely to discover new ways to do their
jobs and generate creative output Nonaka [1994], Nonaka and Krough [2009]. According to
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Nonaka and Krough [2009, p.645], “by bringing together different biographies, practitioners gain ‘fresh’ ideas, insights, and experiences that allow them to reflect on events and situations.…
Practitioners’ diverse tacit knowledge, that they particularly acquired in their diverse social practices, is a source of creativity.” Consistent with this theory, Chen, Williamson, and Zhou
[2012] find that tournament rewards for creativity are more likely to result in creative solutions when awarded to teams rather than to individuals. The organizational knowledge creation
literature also suggests that the process by which ideas are shared in electronic ISSCs enhances creativity more effectively than the process by which individuals usually share ideas in face-to-
face meetings. This is because electronic ISSCs enable individuals to work alone and share ideas at different times, preventing the “production blocking” that occurs when individuals attempt to
simultaneously come up with ideas in face-to-face meetings where they need to take turns to speak up Dennis and Valacich [1993], Girotra, Terwiesch, and Ulrich [2010].
Second, by exposing the employees’ creative work to their superiors andor peers, ISSCs could motivate employees to increase their efforts to produce high-quality creative work. The most
creative workers might feel motivated, knowing that their work could impact others and be recognized within the organization, while the least creative workers might exert efforts to avoid
exposing work they might not feel proud of and the appearance of doing worse work than most of their peers since the work of all employees is exposed side by side.
Despite the arguments presented above, the implementation of ISSCs could backfire and lead to a decrease in creativity. Individuals exposed to the creative work of others could converge on
doing work in similar ways and could decrease rather than increase the creativity of their work. This convergence could result from an unconscious attempt by employees to identify and
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emulate common features of their peers’ creative work or from the employees’ decision to neither pursue nor present their most original ideas for fear of being judged negatively Diehl
and Stroebe [1987]. Furthermore, the exchange of creative ideas among a group of employees could lead to free riding Alchian and Demsetz [1972]. This can occur if individuals copy
others’ ideas in their work or decrease their efforts to produce high-quality work for fear of being copied by their peers.
The conflicting arguments described above suggest that the introduction of an ISSC could lead to either an increase or a decrease in the quality of creative work,
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as stated in the following hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1a: The introduction of an information sharing system recording creative work ISSC will lead to an increase in the quality of the employees’ creative work.
Hypothesis 1b: The introduction of an information sharing system recording creative work ISSC will lead to a decrease in the quality of the employees’ creative work.
2.2. Effect on Employee Engagement
