Employee acceptance of online platforms for knowledge sharing: exploring differences in usage behaviour

Examining online learning platform characteristics and employee engagement relationship during Covid-19

Purpose

As work-from-home policies were being implemented during Covid-19, organizations have been migrating their learning and development programs to digital platforms. This study aims to understand the role of employees’ perceptions about four key attributes of online learning platforms (OLPs), namely, online environment, ease of use, online content (OC) and online engagement anchors in their levels of work engagement (WE). Further, it also investigates how the personality attributes of the employees and financial incentives for online learning influence this relationship.

Design/methodology/approach

Using the snowball sampling technique, online questionnaires were distributed to about 350 employees in four IT firms in India who were working from home during the Covid-19 period. The total number of valid responses was 306 and consisted of software developers, technical leads, process specialists, testers and managers. The analysis was done using Python software (V.3.7.4) packages and Process Macro (pyprocessmacro V.1.0.8) developed for Python.

Findings

Perceived OLP features significantly influence employee WE. OC and ease of use are significant influencers of employee WE. The perception of OLP features indirectly affects WE through the learner’s personality characteristics. Moreover, the financial incentive to learn online shares a negative interaction effect with OLP features to influence WE.

Originality/value

The paper contributes to the existing literature on virtual knowledge management by identifying the driving factors that reinforce the acceptance of OLPs. Moreover, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to link online learning management system key characteristics with employee outcome as engagement. Most of the previous work has ignored exploring such a relationship in an organizational setting.

Research on Face Recognition and Privacy in China-Based on Social Cognition and Cultural Psychology

With the development of big data technology, the privacy concerns of face recognition have become the most critical social issue in the era of information sharing. Based on the perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, social cognition, and cross-cultural aspects, this study analyses the privacy of face recognition and influencing factors. The study collected 518 questionnaires through the Internet, SPSS 25.0 was used to analyze the questionnaire data as well as evaluate the reliability of the data, and Cronbach’s alpha (α coefficient) was used to measure the data in this study. Our findings demonstrate that when users perceive the risk of their private information being disclosed through face recognition, they have greater privacy concerns. However, most users will still choose to provide personal information in exchange for the services and applications they need. Trust in technology and platforms can reduce users’ intention to put up guards against them. Users believe that face recognition platforms can create secure conditions for the use of face recognition technology, thus exhibiting a higher tendency to use such technology. Although perceived ease of use has no significant positive impact on the actual use of face recognition due to other external factors, such as accuracy and technology maturity, perceived usefulness still has a significant positive impact on the actual use of face recognition. These results enrich the literature on the application behavior of face recognition and play an important role in making better use of face recognition by social individuals, which not only facilitates their daily life but also does not disclose personal privacy information.