Changing systems to match their users' needs: understanding the realization of utilitarian value from employee portal use

Employee portals are systems that provide employees with the timely and relevant information that they need to perform their duties and to make efficient business decisions. Although their use is widespread, the question on how benefits of these portals are materialized for their users has not been fully answered yet. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to gain a better understanding of the utilitarian value of employee portals for individual users. Therefore, we develop a second-order hierarchical conceptual model whose core structure is founded on the theoretical behavioral science concepts embedded in the diffusion of innovations theory, theory of planned behavior, and the research stream of engineering psychology. We empirically test the model by means of component-based structural equation modeling. For this, we collected 5,783 employees' responses in a survey of 19 companies. Our results indicate that amongst the theorized factors, the quality of support provided to users is the most important factor that affects employee portal related performance gains. Furthermore, collaborative functionalities of an employee portal acts as a critical mediator that channels benefits arising as a result of efficient support and ergonomic employee portal design towards increasing goal oriented breadth of employee portal usage. Finally, we find that with increasing knowledge-intensity of employee tasks, ergonomicity of an employee portal and breadth of use has a stronger effect on performance gains.