Investigating the Role of Inertia in Business Process Standardization Initiatives

Business process standardization (BPS) is an important instrument for transforming an organization from function orientation to process orientation. But, standardization initiatives’ implementation success is highly volatile. One major reason for failure is the behavior and the underlying job-related attitude of the affected employees. Recent research examining BPS implementation success proposes that different factors of employees’ current jobs (e.g., job characteristics) influence employees’ acceptance of BPS-induced changes. Besides these motivational aspects, IS research has shown that non-adoption of a system is influenced by inertia of the employees. Our research-in-progress paper draws on these findings and aims to analyze the role of inertia in the context of BPS. The contribution of this paper lies in developing a theoretical model for understanding the determinants of individual inertia in the context of BPS. By knowing the influential factors, we will be able to derive adjustable screws for practitioners to successfully implement process standardization initiatives.