Coalition formation during technology adoption

The introduction of a new technology into an organization is often coupled with the formation of opinions of acceptance or rejection by individuals. Given the large costs incurred in implementing the technology, the challenge for organizations is to understand and promote the factors that lead to acceptance. The most prominent framework that addresses this issue is the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), which takes into account the effect of a number of variables on individuals’ acceptance of new technologies. Nevertheless, the role of one of the key factors, namely, social influence, is still not fully understood. Drawing on earlier studies that have considered the contribution of referent individuals to technology acceptance (i.e. social influence), this paper introduces the notion of the ‘coalition’ as a social group that influences the opinion of other, non-coalitional members of an organization. We employ this framework in an empirical study centering on an organization – a global financial group – which has recently decided to introduce Big Data into the organization’s formal operations. Through a unique empirical approach that analyzes the sentiments expressed by individuals about this technology on the organization’s online forum, which includes 258 meaningful comments from 66 active forum participants, we demonstrate the emergence of a central coalition on the Big Data issue, and the dynamics of influence of this coalition upon the attitude (i.e. intention to use) of individuals who participated in the discussion forum. Our paper contributes to existing TAM frameworks by elaborating the social influence variable and providing a dynamic lens to the technology acceptance process, while offering a methodological tool that can be utilized by organizations to understand social dynamics that form about a newly introduced technology and accelerate its acceptance by employees.