Beyond Individuals’ Use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs): A Multi-level Approach in Research on ICTs

Hu et al. (2020), in their focal article, discussed the past, current, and future of research on information and communication technologies (ICTs) in industrial-organizational (IO) psychology and related research fields. While Hu et al. (2020) mentioned that they “categorize current themes of ICT research […] at the individual level of analysis” (p. 6), they did not provide an explanation for why they focused their review on only individual-level studies. Despite extensive research on how ICTs influence employee attitudes and behaviors (e.g., Gajendran & Harrion, 2007), significantly less attention has been paid to the impact of ICT-use on collective outcomes. Nevertheless, ICT-related policies and practices are applied to a whole team or firm; hence, their impact on team- or firm-level outcomes is worthy of further examination. Given that the current COVID-19 pandemic has forced most organizations to implement telecommuting (Gallup, 2020), we take telecommuting, one of the ICTs discussed in Hu et al. (2020), as an example to illustrate the importance of multi-level thinking in ICT research.