Abstract

Many firms are trying to give Information Technology (IT) a more central role in their business strategies in an attempt to combat the economic downturn. As such, they want to hire Chief Information Officers (CIOs) to manage this process but don’t want to upset the existing power balance of the executive team. We propose the CIO's formal position in the firm, the CIO's business and technical knowledge, and the important connections the CIO has established are CIO attributes that may influence the shared understanding of the business and IT executive team members and, in turn, financial performance. Analyzing data collected from 138 CIOs, the results suggest structural power and prestige power are positively associated with social alignment. However, expert power may not be related to social alignment. We also found a positive relationship between social alignment and financial performance. We discuss the implications of these results for research and practice.

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