Assessing and managing employee readiness for embracing e-business

Abstract

It is imperative for business to use network and distributed information technology in purpose of integrating resources among organizations, vendors, employees, and suppliers to maximize the value-added in the competitive business environment. This causes organizations to implement electronic business (e-business) at an accelerating pace and has fueled predictions and speculations about how ready are their employees to embrace this new type of firms. Unfortunately, there is very sparse scholarly research paid on this issue. Thus, drawing on insights from the extant literature and interviews with practitioners, this article first proposes the construct of employee readiness for e-business (EREB) and its conceptualization. Then it describes a program of research that was undertaken to develop an EREB instrument by defining, operationalizing, and purifying the construct into a multi-item scale to measure it, and assessing the scale's psychometric properties. By strictly iterative processes, a well-validated EREB instrument was presented. The instrument and its comprehensive model proposed in this paper would be contributive to researchers and practitioners interested in designing, implementing, and managing e-business.