Mari-Klara Stein, graduate of the Bentley PhD program in Business, recently won the 2016 CIONET “European Research Paper of the Year” award with three colleagues, Bentley’s University Distinguished Professor and former Provost, Bob Galliers, former Bentley Professor and PhD Director, Sue Newell, and Erica Wagner from Portland State University. The award was given for their research examining users’ emotional responses to information technology in the workplace. Stein, lead author of the award-winning paper, is now an assistant professor of IT Management at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.

The paper, developed from research conducted as part of Stein’s doctoral work under Galliers’ supervision at Bentley, was published in the journal MIS Quarterly, arguably the world’s top information systems academic journal. Titled “Coping with Information Technology: Mixed Emotions, Vacillation, and Nonconforming Use Patterns,” the study examines the implementation and adoption of performance measurement systems at two North American universities.

CIONET, the largest community of IT executives worldwide, selected an initial pool of 18 papers as candidates for the award, then narrowed it down to 2 finalists via a jury of IT professionals and academics from across Europe. Stein then presented the paper at the annual CIONET meeting, held earlier this year in Amsterdam. The meeting is attended by many of Europe’s leading chief information officers. According to CIONET, the European Research Paper of the Year “embodies the most excellence both in rigour and relevance of research.”

Stein and her colleagues examined how faculty responded to the implementation of new performance measurement systems at different universities, paying particular attention to the little-studied role of users’ emotional responses to new IT systems. Their paper shows that although the initial feedback to new systems can be emotionally negative, wise leaders are able to use that feedback to improve those systems, increase adoption, and productively manage change in the workplace.

In fact, Stein and her colleagues argue, companies ignore users’ emotional resistance to IT at their peril, since it can often represent employees’ attempts to find a way to work within the larger system, while still preserving their sense of autonomy. Approaches that are too “top down,” authoritarian, or inflexible will risk alienating users from IT—and management—even further, whereas “bottom-up” approaches that are open to compromise and rule-bending can achieve more positive, and less costly, results.