The Examination of Relationship between Individual's Cognitive Styles and Their Perception of Usefulness of IT

Understanding how individuals perceive an emerging technology can have a profound impact on how successfully the technology is adopted. We conjectured that the cognitive style of an individual would have a significant bearing on the way the person perceives the technology. We conducted a laboratory experiment to investigate whether cognitive styles affect the perception of RFID, one of the emerging technologies. The findings suggest that a person’s cognitive style does indeed matter how he/she perceives the usefulness of the technology. Individuals of thinking and judging cognitive style are more likely to perceive higher value with RFID than those of feeling and perceiving cognitive style. We also provide discussion on the managerial and theoretical implications of our findings.