The Impact of Individual's Identities on the Infusion of Information Systems within Organisations

Organisations continue to invest substantially in enterprise systems with the planned expectations that employees will utilise these technologies to enhance organisational competitive advantages in a progressive global marketplace. However, researchers have found that the functional potential of many of these systems are underutilised and rarely infused into individuals’ work practices. Much of the literature on IS infusion has been done at the organisational level, with little attention paid on user characteristics and their intrinsic motivations. As such this paper proposes to examine the influence of individuals’ IT identity and IS infusion role identity on IS infusion. Identity theories are adopted to conceptualise a research model and investigate the relationships between these factors. A surveybased study is proposed to empirically validate the research model, using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) techniques. In addition, we plan to conduct in-depth interviews with selected users to support results from PLS-SEM. The potential contribution of this study is to advance our understanding from a theoretical and practical perspective of why IS are infused by individuals in organisations.