Making The Horse Drink: Employee Acceptance Of Technology Improves Productivity

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Businesses have invested huge amounts of money in computer technology, but they have not seen similar gains in productivity because employees don’t always use the technology effectively, according to University of Arkansas professor Fred Davis. Davis has identified strategies employers can use to improve employee acceptance and use of computer technologies.

"Lackluster returns from organizational investment in information technology are a critical problem," explained Davis. "Understanding and creating conditions to facilitate acceptance by employees is a high-priority issue."

Davis, chairman of the Department of Computer Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis, developed the Technology Acceptance Model over a decade ago. This widely used model says that perceived usefulness and ease of use determine if an individual will use a new technology. His latest research has led to the development of a new model, TAM2, which was recently published in Management Science. This model expands on why employees think a new computer technology will be useful and how that affects their intended use of the technology.

Davis and Viswanath Venkatesh of the University of Maryland studied implementations of new computer technologies in four different manufacturing and financial services companies over a period of time. In two, the use of the technology was voluntary and in two it was mandatory.

To get more information on employees’ intention to use a computer technology, they looked at perceived usefulness in detail. Key components in the study were social influences - voluntariness, image and the opinion of persons important to the employee - and cognitive influences - the employees’ own opinions about usefulness of the new technology in their job.

"This research points toward many ways to improve employee usage of information technologies," Davis notes. "Developing new implementation strategies could substantially increase employee usage and enhance productivity. We learned, for example, that mandatory, compliance-based approaches are less effective over time. This means that employers should focus on social influence strategies and directly address the cognitive influences."

Over the past decade many studies have shown perceived usefulness as the strongest determinant of usage, according to Davis. Researchers found that employees are more likely to use a technology if they believe that it is useful for their particular jobs.

"Given the impact of perceived usefulness, it becomes important to identify what causes employees to think of a technology as useful," said Davis. "This would allow organizations to develop strategies to increase user acceptance and use of new systems."

Prior to the introduction of the technology, the opinion of other people significant to the employee had a great deal of influence, Davis found, but only if the implementation was mandatory. Even then, the importance of this element diminished over time as the employee used the new technology.

"Organizational mandates don’t always have a positive effect on technology use," notes Davis. "Even when usage is mandatory, usage intentions vary because some users are unwilling to comply with such mandates."

In studying employee opinions about the usefulness of the new technology, Davis and Venkatesh focused on job relevance, output quality, ease of use and tangible results. They found that employees are more positive toward a new technology if they think that it is directly useful to their job and performs the tasks well.

Although perceived relevance and quality are closely related, the way employees use them is different. Job relevance is used to eliminate systems from consideration that are judged to be less relevant. Output quality is used to select one system from among several options.

"Even effective systems can fail to get user acceptance because of lack of result demonstrability," explained Davis. "If users can’t tie gains in their job performance directly to the use of the new system, they are unlikely to think of it as useful."

These studies show that social influences are more effective in making positive changes in perceived usefulness. This means that, rather than mandating usage, employers could implement more effective social influence strategies, such as increasing the credibility of internal sources or designing communication campaigns that increase the prestige associated with system use.

Suggestions for improving employee opinions include designing systems that better match employee needs and improving output quality and ease of use. The research also indicates that empirical demonstrations of the effectiveness of the new system, when compared to current practices, would provide important leverage for increasing user acceptance, according to Davis and Venkatesh.