Management Emotion and Firm’s Propensity of Strategic IT Investment

Abstract

Firm’s propensity of strategic IT investment describes the tendency of firms to engage in different strategic roles of IT when IT investment decisions are made. Different from prior IS business value literature that has largely taken rational decision making for granted, this paper considers the irrational characteristics of firms’ decision making and investigated the impacts of management emotion on firms’ propensity of strategic IT investment. Based on 191 annual reports data of 32 companies from three industries in a 6-year period (i.e., 2010-2015 fiscal year), we applied sentiment analysis to retrieve emotion tunes embedded in each report and analyzed the relationship with both the volume and the composition of three types of strategic IT signals (automate, informate and transform). Our results show that positive management emotion promotes firm’s propensity of all types of strategic IT investments, however, informate and/or transform IT gain more weights. With positive management emotion, firms also show propensity of investing in strategic IT different from the industry’s dominant IT strategic role