Understanding the Role of Emotion in Self-Service Technology Adoption: A Structured Abstract

Abstract

Recent advances in technology have given organizations the opportunity to provide self-service through the medium of technology, and accordingly, the provision of these technology-based services has increased in the last decade (Holman & Buzek, 2007; Lee et al., 2010). Providing consumers with the opportunity for self-service allows organizations to reduce the number of staff members needed to provide a service to customers (Meuter et al., 2000). This allows organizations to speed up a service while maintaining costs, or to maintain speed while reducing costs. Importantly though, when providing these self-service options, organizations must ensure that standards of service are maintained in order to benefit from the reduction in staffing. This generates a requirement that organizations understand why consumers try, and continue to use, self-service technology. While the trial aspects of self-service technology are well represented in research (Curran, Meuter & Surprenant, 2003; Meuter et al., 2005), the process of adoption is represented less so. Central to technology adoption literature is the technology acceptance model (TAM) (Davis, 1989), and it has been applied to cover employee (Davis, 1989; Venkatesh & Davis, 2000), customer facing (Lin, Shih & Sher, 2007; Wang & Butler, 2007), and self-service (Alhudaithy & Kitchen, 2009; Pikkarainen, et. al., 2004) technology adoption; however, it has been suggested that improvements can be made to increase the relevance of the model for modern scenarios (Bagozzi, 2007). Specifically, while the cognitive antecedents of technology adoption are well covered, the role of emotion in the process is somewhat underrepresented, or simplified. Accordingly, in development of past methodologies, the current study aims to investigate the role of emotion in adoption, providing a more thorough representation of the self-service technology adoption process.