There-fore, employees in such organizations are likely to follow promising visions and to take risks in order to achieve them. In this regard, they also provide entrepreneurial skills within their companies. Rational culture is characterized by a strong external focus and the emphasis of control. Therefore, its main values refer to productivity and performance. In this regard, the achievement of well-defined goals plays a major role in such organizations. Accordingly, em-ployees primarily concentrate on competition and optimizing their work routines. Hierar-chical culture is characterized by a strong internal focus and the emphasis of control. Its main values refer to security and order by strictly following regulations and rules. Accordingly, employees in such organizations can be described as rather conservative. Following this as-pect, they are focused on ensuring stability. While the CVF portrays these types of organiza-tional culture, it is important to notice that organizations in practice cannot be represented by a single type of culture (Denison and Spreitzer 1991). Instead, an organization will be rather described through a combination of these types, in which one type may be dominant (Cameron and Quinn 2011).
willingness to disclose information in OSNs should also hold for the intra-organizational con-text. Hence, we hypothesize:
H1: Employees’ trusting beliefs are positively associated with their willingness to disclose information within an ESN.
H2: Employees’ risk beliefs are negatively associated with their willingness to disclose in-formation within an ESN.
Beside possible influences of users’ beliefs on their willingness to disclose, existing literature has also investigated the relationship between trusting and risk beliefs (Malhotra et al. 2004).
Similar to prior empirical results, we argue that employees’ perception towards the trustwor-thiness of their employers influences their risk beliefs. Specifically, if employees feel that their employers act on behalf on their employees’ interests and that the employer is honest in handling their information, it is likely that employees would not expect their employers to act opportunistically when using information disclosed in an ESN (e.g., an employee would not be blamed for a prediction that does not come true). Thus, employees are likely to have re-duced risk beliefs regarding the information disclosure. We hypothesize:
H3: Employees’ trusting beliefs are negatively associated with their risk beliefs with regard to disclosing information within an ESN.
4.3.2 Flexible Cultures and Their Influence on Trusting and Risk Beliefs
In order to examine the influence of organizational culture on employees’ trusting and risk beliefs, we focus on culture types characterized by an orientation towards flexibility instead of control (i.e., group and development culture). Flexible cultures emphasize change and sponta-neity—an orientation which fits the nature and purposes of ESNs: as mentioned before, ESNs aim to support rather unstructured tasks and rarely predefined usage scenarios (Herzog et al.
2015; McAfee 2009; Richter and Riemer 2013b). Besides, culture types highlighting flexibil-ity are especially important when considering organizational change that accompanies with the introduction of an ESN (e.g. changed communication and collaboration patterns, the es-tablishment of new workflows, or altered interaction between different management levels).
As employees working in companies with a high group or development culture have a par-ticular mind-set when it comes to change (Denison and Spreitzer 1991; Quinn and Rohrbaugh 1983), they are able to adapt to it more quickly. Thus, we expect that this mind-set will also be reflected in employee’s attitude towards an ESN as the ESN causes and is part of the or-ganizational change. Referring to these reasons, we argue that culture types highlighting
flex-ibility will have a particular influence on how employees behave in an ESN. While it could be assumed that rational and hierarchical culture (i.e., the remaining types offered by the CVF) might exert effects, which are exactly inversely related to those of group and development cultures, both conceptual and empirical studies argue otherwise (e.g., Iivari and Huisman 2007; McDermott and Stock 1999; Moorman 1995; Quinn and Rohrbaugh 1983). Therefore, we did not include additional hypotheses for these types. Still, we controlled for both rational and hierarchical culture.
Going further, we differentiate between a direct and an indirect mechanism how organization-al culture affects trusting and risk beliefs. Below, we argue that group culture exerts a direct effect, whereas development culture has an indirect effect on trusting and risk beliefs.
According to the CVF, group culture emphasizes values such as participation, belonging, and commitment (Denison and Spreitzer 1991). These values are the foundation for several be-haviors like open communication (Hartnell et al. 2011) and strong teamwork (Cameron and Quinn 2011). As a consequence, employees in a group culture are intensively and consciously cooperating with each other. Thereby, they are developing common goals and a strong team spirit. We argue that, in such a culture, an opportunistic behavior is less likely to occur. This should cause employees to develop strong trusting beliefs in general, but also in our particular case of disclosing information in ESNs.
H4: The extent to which group culture is present is positively associated with employees’
trusting beliefs regarding their disclosure of information within an ESN.
Concerning employees’ assessments of potential losses (i.e., risk beliefs), their strong in-volvement (Cameron and Quinn 2011) and belonging to a company (Denison and Spreitzer 1991) are crucial in a group culture. We argue that employees, who develop common goals in a group, experience failure and losses as a group as well. In other words: negative events ex-perienced by a certain employee will be perceived as negative events happening to the whole group. Therefore, employees in a strong group culture should have no interest in harming each other, since this would, in turn, harm the group they are members of. Thus, employees should perceive a lower potential for losses in a group culture:
H5: The extent to which group culture is present is negatively associated with employees’ risk beliefs regarding their disclosure of information within an ESN.
Since hierarchical culture emphasizes an internal focus like group culture, we controlled for its direct influence on employees’ trusting and risk beliefs. In contrast to the direct effect of
group culture, we propose that development cultures should affect employees’ trusting and risk beliefs through an indirect mechanism. This distinction can be explained by the differ-ence in focus of group and development cultures. While group cultures emphasize an internal orientation towards the own organization, development cultures are more concerned with an external perspective concentrating on the market and the organization’s environment (Quinn and Rohrbaugh 1983). Accordingly, the core values of a development culture are growth, cre-ativity, and the continuous adaption to external requirements (Denison and Spreitzer 1991).
Unlike a group culture, the values of a development culture are not directly linked to employ-ees’ trusting and risk beliefs.
Instead, another phenomenon can be observed in development cultures, which should indi-rectly affect employees’ trusting and risk beliefs: employees working in companies with a strong development culture are focused on developing innovative products and services (Naranjo‐Valencia et al. 2011). Thereby, companies are fostering their employees’ entrepre-neurial behaviors within the company (Cameron and Quinn 2011). Employees practicing these entrepreneurial activities are used (and required) to apply trial and error approaches (Garvin and Levesque 2006), take risks (Hartnell et al. 2011), and utilize mistakes to learn (Politis 2005). Accordingly, we argue that employees in organizations with a strong develop-ment culture should be less afraid of making errors in their daily work routines. This should prevent what literature refers to as an “error aversion culture” (Van Dyck et al. 2005). An error aversion culture is present when employees within an organization strongly fear and try to avoid mistakes (Van Dyck et al. 2005). As a consequence, we propose:
H6: The extent to which development culture is present is negatively associated with an error aversion culture within an organization.
As rational and development culture have an external focus in common, we controlled for rational culture’s effect on error aversion culture. A company’s error aversion culture presents a general concept that describes an environment in which work and projects are carried out (Van Dyck et al. 2005). Accordingly, we argue that when ESNs are introduced within an or-ganization and employees are requested to disclose information within a system, their atti-tudes and behaviors regarding this system will be influenced by this environment as well.
Employees working in a strong error aversion culture develop negative feelings since they are constantly worried about making mistakes (Van Dyck et al. 2005; Van Dyck et al. 2010). As is known from research in psychology, individuals’ emotional states significantly influence how they process information and arrive at evaluations of target entities (Bagozzi et al. 1999).
Specifically, prior research has shown that individuals will evaluate a stimulus more positive-ly if they experience positive feelings and more negativepositive-ly if negative feelings are present (e.g., Forgas and Bower 1987; Isen et al. 1978; Schwarz and Clore 1983). In addition, nega-tive emotions experienced by an individual also trigger a more skeptical mode of information processing (Pham 2007). Consequently, negative feelings caused by a strong error aversion culture should also affect individuals’ trusting and risk beliefs with regard to an ESN. There-fore, they are more likely to develop lower trusting and higher risk beliefs regarding the dis-closure of information in ESNs:
H7: The extent to which error aversion culture is present is negatively associated with em-ployees’ trusting beliefs with regard to disclosing information within an ESN.
H8: The extent to which error aversion culture is present is positively associated with em-ployees’ risk beliefs with regard to disclosing information within an ESN.