The Effects of Process Accountability on Individuals’ Use of a Familiar Technology

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Individuals’ technology use decisions are critical to the success of information technology in an organizational context. We investigate the influence of process accountability on individual professionals’ intended and actual use of a familiar technology in decision-making tasks directly related to their work role by anchoring in the core constructs of the technology acceptance model (TAM). Our focus differs from traditional initial user acceptance research in that participants have considerable knowledge about and experience with the focal technology. According to results from an experiment involving 130 participants, process accountability has a significant, positive effect on perceived technology usefulness, intention to use, and actual technology use. Further analyses show that perceived technology usefulness mediates the accountability-intention relationship and intention to use mediates the accountability-actual use relationship. By incorporating process accountability into the TAM and empirically testing its effects, we shed light on the causal link between process accountability and people’s perceptions of a familiar technology’s usefulness, as well as their intentions and actual use of the technology. Our findings show that process accountability, a source of extrinsic motivation commonly found in business work contexts, has important effects on people’s decisions to use a familiar technology in work-related decision-making tasks. We extend user technology acceptance research by connecting motivation theories, cognitive information processing, and user technology acceptance, particularly in scenarios that involve voluntary use of familiar technology, and the requirement to justify the procedure used for deriving a decision or completing a problem-solving task. Our findings have several important implications for technology acceptance decisions and management practice.