Adoption of enterprise mobile systems – An alternative theoretical perspective

Abstract

Enterprises nudge the usage of mobile devices to ensure business continuity, although this tends to amplify corporate security risks. Consequently, corporations adopt Enterprise Mobile Systems (EMS) to facilitate employees working from home, ensuring security and privacy. Notwithstanding the business benefits of EMS, the adoption rate of these solutions by employees is significantly low. Traditional theories on technology adoption do not explain why some employees choose to use EMS through their mobile devices to access official applications, while others refrain. This study uses construal level theory and rational choice theory to examine the role of use contexts and intention to comply with EMS policy on employees' decision to adopt EMS. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods was applied. A mixed approach was followed for this study and analysis was done based on country-wide cross-sectional survey of 330 professionals engaged with reputed information technology companies. The results highlight that employees’ use contexts and intentions to comply with the EMS policy are strong antecedents of adapting to new systems. The results also reinforce that policy awareness positively affects the intention to comply with EMS policies, impacting employee engagement and task performance.