Information Culture and Effective Use of Information Tools at Work

Abstract

Office work is increasingly collaborative in the 21st century. ‘Information culture' is a broad set of values and behavioural workplace norms pertaining to information management and use. To investigate whether information culture influences use of collaborative information tools, conceptualization and measurement instruments are presented for information culture and measuring effective use. ‘Group adoption' is a behavioural proxy for effective use, and ‘information sharing' and ‘proactive information use' were selected as behavioural proxies for information culture. In a study of an engineering firm, group adoption was correlated with actual use of an information tool and with two tool attitude measures. Group adoption was also correlated with both information culture measures. The findings here suggest new avenues of research into the broader applicability of group adoption, and the ways in which conceptualization and measurement of information culture may be further developed.