Functional Affordance Archetypes: a New Perspective for Examining the Impact of IT Use on Desirable Outcomes

IT usage is generally viewed as a key indicator of adoption success and a prerequisite for deriving benefits. Yet, while IT usage can provide a good measure of adoption success, it does not necessarily yield desirable outcomes, i.e., the individual benefits expected by its designers. This paper investigates how IT use leads to its desirable outcomes based on a functional affordance (FA) perspective (Markus and Silver 2008). Specifically, we define perceived functional affordances (PFA) as an IT’s afforded possibilities for action as perceived by an individual user. Further, by following Eisenhardt’s (1989) approach of theory building from multiple cases, we develop a PFA typology and introduce four PFA archetypes: i.e. Facilitator, Guardian Angel, Imposer, and Inhibitor. Subsequently, we intend to use these archetypes to explain under what conditions the PFA of an e-health system can be transformed into usage that is conducive to the attainment of its desirable outcomes.