The contingent effect of personal IT innovativeness and IT self-efficacy on innovative use of complex IT

While organizational investment in complex information technologies (IT) keeps growing, these technologies are often applied at a superficial level and fail to attain the promised benefits. To further extract the value potential of complex IT, this study investigates employee users’ innovate with IT (IwIT), which is a post-acceptance behavior that refers to individual users’ applying IT in novel ways to support their task performance. Drawing on the information systems continuance (ISC) model, we propose a research framework with perceived usefulness (PU) and satisfaction (SAT) as the antecedents of IwIT. We further emphasize the contingent role of personal characteristics and include personal innovativeness with IT (PIIT) and information technology self-efficacy (ITSE) as the moderators of the framework. We validate the model with data from users of two complex ITs: enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business intelligence (BI) technologies. The results suggest that positioning personal factors as moderators significantly increases the explanatory power of the ISC model and offers a more comprehensive understanding about IwIT. Specifically, ITSE positively moderates the effect of PU, and negatively moderates the effect of SAT, on IwIT. The moderating role of PIIT, however, is subject to the specific type of IT of investigation.