Date of Award

Summer 6-2020

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Info Systems/Dec Sciences

Program/Concentration

Business Administration -- Information Technology & Supply Chain Management

Committee Director

Li D. Xu

Committee Member

Lan Cao

Committee Member

Timothy M. Komarek

Abstract

Many scholars have been studying information technology (IT) capability and its impact on business performance. However, it has been debated whether the IT capability influences firm performance because prior literature shows mixed results. To understand this phenomenon, I performed two studies in this research, placed in two parts. First, by deploying the new concept of accumulation of IT capability, I attempted to reinvestigate the relationship between IT capability and business performance. Next, I examined what factors influence the accumulation of IT capability. In the first part, I suggested two novel constructs that measure the extent of the accumulation of IT capability: aggregated IT capability, which represents a firm’s frequency of appearance on the IW500 list, and continuous IT capability, which indicates a firm’s consecutive appearance on the list. From hypothesis tests, I confirmed that the extent of a firm’s ability to keep its IT capability could influence its business performance based on timeline and types of ratios. In the second part, to examine the managerial and financial factors in firms’ long-term retention of IT capability, I employed survival analysis to substantiate how various factors are related to a firm’s risk of losing IT capability. The results show that turnover in IT managers, which can bring in outside knowledge and experience, allows firms to retain IT capability, whereas IT managers’ structural power does not contribute to firms sustaining their IT capability. I also find that continuous IT capability can be influenced by firms’ industry characteristics, which may have different levels of information intensity.

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DOI

10.25777/676k-pm29

ISBN

9798678107152

ORCID

0000-0002-4064-157X

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