Attitude toward Organizational Change andInformation Systems Adoption

While world information systems (IS) spending has increased annually as organizations around the world have made enormous investments in IS, the relationship between IS investment and productivity has perplexed researchers and practitioners over the last decade. It has been argued that investments in IS can lead to productivity gains only if they are accepted and used in a way that contributes to the strategic and operational goals of the organization. While it is commonly assumed that IS have the potential to transform organizations, many attempts to introduce IS into organizations for the purpose of organizational change have often faced resistance to change from organizational members. The resistance to change is likely to lead to IS adoption failures through users’ behavior to resist the system, regardless of whether the technical attributes of the system are met with users’ requirements. This means that individual’s response to organizational change should be considered as an independent factor in explaining the IS adoption behavior along with the beliefs about technological attributes of the system such as usefulness and ease of use. As a result, one of the keys to understanding IS usage behavior lies in understanding what perception individuals have on organizational change. Recognizing the organizational change nature of IS introduction, this study incorporates the attitude toward organizational change as an additional factor of explanatory variables in understanding why organizational members adopt and use the specific IS. For this purpose, a field research was conducted based on the data gathered from a Web-based survey. Overall, some support was found for the research model tested in this study. The data analysis showed that an individual’s perception on utilization behavior was significantly affected by the individual’s beliefs about the system’s usefulness and ease of use representing the technological attributes of the system. At the same time, it was observed that an individual’s utilization behavior of information systems was highly dependent on the individual’s attitude toward change. Even though we had expected that the individual’s attitude toward change also affect one’s perception on the system’s usefulness, their relationship was not supported. This means that an individual’s attitude toward change influences the system acceptance as an independent determinant, not mediated by perceived usefulness. In conclusion, theoretical and practical implications are discussed along with limitations and future research direction.