What drives post-adoption usage? Investigating the negative and positive antecedents of disruptive technology continuous adoption intentions

Abstract

This article focuses on the pre-adoption antecedents of disruptive technology continuous adoption intentions at the firm level. Understanding how to make a quality adoption decision, as measured by the firm's satisfaction and intention to continue using the technology after the initial adoption phase, is of critical importance for a buying manager. Given this challenge, a model for disruptive technology continuous adoption intention is proposed that considers the following: pre-adoption interorganizational trust, mimetic competitor pressures, normative supplier pressures, efficiency motives, searching efforts, and post-adoption satisfaction. This model was tested using survey results from 211 recent purchasing managers of a cloud computing service, an emerging disruptive technology. Interestingly, normative pressures from supplying firms prior to adoption led to lower user satisfaction and, consequently, lower intentions to continue adopting and using the technology. Moreover, these pressures were driven by pre-adoption levels of interorganizational trust and mimetic pressures from competitors. Potential adopting managers of a disruptive technology should instead be driven by efficiency-oriented motives and actually aim to increase their searching efforts in order to better understand the disruptive technology prior to adoption. These findings add to prior literature demonstrating the complex interplay of external pressures and internal motives on technology adoption strategies.