The objective of this paper is to contribute to a deeper understanding of system usage in organizations by examining its multilevel nature. Past research on system usage has suffered from a levels bias, with researchers studying system usage at single levels of analysis only (e.g., the individual, group, or organizational level). Although single-level research can be useful, we suggest that studying organizations one level at a time will ultimately lead to an unnatural, incomplete, and very disjointed view of how information systems are used in practice. To redress this situation, we draw on recent advances in multilevel theory to present system usage as a multilevel construct and provide an illustration for what it takes for researchers to study it as such. The multilevel perspective advanced in this article offers rich opportunities for theoretical and empirical insights and suggests a new foundation for in-depth research on the nature of system usage, its emergence and change, and its antecedents and consequences.
Despite the fact that several event studies have investigated the market's reaction to information technology (IT) investment announcements, little is known about how specific transactional risks influence the market value of a firm. This study examines stock market data to assess investors' responses to various transactional risks associated with IT outsourcing. More specifically, we develop and test several hypotheses to understand how transactional risks that arise due to a range of factors (i.e., the size of outsourcing contracts, difficulties in performance monitoring, asset specificity of IT resources, vendor capability, and the lack of cultural similarity between client and vendor firms) influence investors' reactions to IT outsourcing announcements. Our results indicate that most of these factors indeed significantly influence investors' perceptions of the risks involved in IT outsourcing. We discuss these findings in a larger organizational context and offer implications for both research and practice. In particular, our study offers a theoretical rationale for why negative reactions to IT outsourcing announcements may occur, while providing practitioners with several means by which they can increase the informational value of outsourcing arrangements.
This paper develops a conceptual framework to explain employees' technology usage within organizations. Much of the prior information systems literature has assumed an underlying relationship between "facilitating conditions" for information technology (IT) adoption (e.g., user training, technical support, resource availability) and employees' technology use. Although these facilitating conditions are important, they do not provide a complete explanation of employees' IT usage. The reality of working in organizational settings suggests a different model of IT adoption and usage. Drawing from research on social information processing theory, and acknowledging the role of other individuals within the work context that shapes employees' learning, values, and behavior, we propose a framework to explain employees' adoption of IT and their level of usage within organizations, featuring both individual-level factors and factors related to the social information processing influence of co-workers. Our results show that an employee's coworkers exert an important influence on IT usage, whereas individual-level factors exhibit more modest effects.