Cross-Cultural Use of Technology in Management Education

Abstract

Personal technologies are ingrained into our everyday living and smartphones are prominent cohabitants. Higher Education settings view the integration of technology and heavily digitized individuals into education settings as a double-edged sword. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use and effect of purposeful as well as non- purposeful digital behaviors. A mixed methods approach looked at both student (389 survey respondents) and teacher (30 interviews) perspectives and behaviors on smartphone use in higher education in China, Australia and France. The authors found that technology usage in class leads to poorer individual academic performance. This relationship was complicated by improved student outcomes for certain social media platforms usage in the classroom setting. Student in- class smartphone usage influenced teaching workloads, feelings of control and motivation. Smartphone usage in the classroom exhibited inadvertent effects on teamwork and similar effects were seen across countries for both students and teachers. Future studies need to explore the behavioral drivers behind cyberloafing to enable the creation of suitable nudges within settings to drive positive outcomes and the creation of a nurturing digital culture. Digital activities within the educational and organization environment are less transparent as the responsibility for managing this increased digitization needs a mechanism for consensus by all parties involved, in a constantly changing digital work-space. This study combines the exploration of purposeful as well as non-purposeful smartphone usage from both the student as well as the teacher perspective across two disciplines and three culture settings.