A Social Network Perspective to Understand Employees' Post-Acceptance Usage of Information Systems

Abstract

Recent Information Systems (IS) publications reveal an emerging interest in studying post-acceptance system usage behaviors. An individual's coworkers can be important sources of help in overcoming knowledge barriers constraining deep use of a complex system, and such interactions with others can determine an employee's ability to influence system usage innovatively. In order to research the relationship between social interactions and post-acceptance usage of IS, based on the social network perspective, we build the relational model and make an empirical study on the theoretical model by taking 55 work groups, 220 employees as the samples. The results show that the helping among group members each other can be important sources in overcoming knowledge barriers. By coping and influencing mechanism, network density and network centrality have different effects on different post-acceptance usage. Specifically, network density is beneficial to employees to cope with the challenge of system, and has significant positive impacts on both the routine usage and innovative usage. Network centrality associating with influencing pathways also has significant positive impacts on innovative usage.