Normalizing the Shadows - The Role of Symbolic Models for Individuals' Shadow IT Usage

Employees increasingly use cloud services of third party providers to efficiently perform their job. Interestingly, the majority adopts the cloud without approval of the organization. IT resources like that are commonly referred to as shadow IT. Although widespread in practice, the present literature on shadow IT is scarce lacking a clear definition of the phenomenon and exclusively focusing on the organizational perspective. This research addresses the issue at the individual level. We define shadow IT usage as voluntary usage of any IT resource violating injunctive IT norms at work as reaction to perceived situational constraints with the intent to enhance work performance, but not to harm the organization. Building furthermore on theories of organizational frustration, social learning, and norm salience, we develop a research model of individuals’ shadow IT usage to analyze the inhibiting effect of explicit IT usage restrictions on users’ deviant behaviors in a future laboratory experiment.