Group-level effects of facilitating conditions on individual acceptance of information systems

Much of the research effort in the area of technology acceptance has been directed to investigating the effects of various variables operating at the individual-level without considering the conjoint effects of group-level variables on individual acceptance. The present research addresses this issue by proposing a group-level variable, organizational facilitating conditions, and examining its effects on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model, a widely used individual user acceptance model. Two field studies were conducted to explore the multilevel nature of technology acceptance. In the first study, we refined the construct of facilitating conditions and developed a new measure of facilitating conditions to explicitly add the organizational facilitating conditions dimension as well as to augment the existing measure. Subsequent testing of the measure confirmed the multilevel nature of the construct. In the second study, we examined the effects of the organizational facilitating conditions on individual acceptance behaviors by utilizing the hierarchical linear modeling approach. The results indicate that the two constructs, individual facilitating conditions and organizational facilitating conditions, are distinct and that, compared to individual facilitating conditions, the organizational facilitating conditions as a group-level variable explain a larger amount of variance in individual acceptance behavior. The resulting model offers a multilevel perspective to the technology acceptance research area while the study results provide an augmented way to evaluate facilitating conditions with a prescriptive guidance to managers.