Contextualizing the Adoption of Electric Collaboration Tools: System and Team Considerations

This study suggests that individuals’ technology adoption decisions in the context of online collaboration tools are based on individual-level assessments of the technology, as well as on group-level attributes of the team with which one needs to work. Thus, a multilevel model of online collaboration technology adoption is proposed and tested, using hierarchical linear modeling techniques applied to a sample of 96 individuals who were nested in 34 virtual teams. Our findings suggest that a team member’s perceptions regarding the usefulness of an online collaboration tool positively affect his or her behavioral intentions to use this tool in a similar context in the future. Furthermore, after controlling for individual level perceived usefulness, group potency, as a team-level concept, incrementally and positively affected team members’ intentions to use the online collaboration technology with a similar team in the future. Some implications and future research directions are discussed.