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Causal recipes for acceptance and refusal of corporate blogs
Journal of Business Research 69 (2016) 1492–1497
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Journal of Business Research
Causal recipes for acceptance and refusal of corporate blogs☆ Ángel Hernández-García ⁎, Santiago Iglesias-Pradas, Pedro Fernández-Cardador Ingeniería de Organización, Administración de Empresas y Estadística, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Av. Complutense 30, 28040 Madrid, Spain
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Article history: Received 1 February 2015 Received in revised form 1 July 2015 Accepted 1 September 2015 Available online 26 October 2015 Keywords: Corporate blogs Acceptance Refusal Fuzzy sets Qualitative comparative analysis fsQCA
a b s t r a c t This study proposes an alternative approach to the study of technology acceptance and refusal behaviors in organizations. Whereas traditional technology acceptance studies focus on structural modeling and the explanation of net effects, this research investigates the different conjunctural causal relations among variables affecting adoption that lead to acceptance or refusal to use corporate blogs in companies for knowledge-sharing purposes. The research includes five conditions—behavioral intention, perceived critical mass, social anxiety, technical support, and managerial support—and uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to observe how these conditions affect four different outcomes: presence and absence of knowledge-creation and knowledge-acquisition behaviors, respectively. The results complement prior studies and provide insight on how corporate blog acceptance and refusal processes operate. © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction Technology acceptance studies usually adopt a utilitarian view of technology adoption by individuals within organizations. This approach is valid when studies focus on the analysis of productivity systems or when the reason to use a technology depends heavily on expected benefits. However, purely utilitarian approaches to acceptance of some other technologies may be incomplete. Corporate blogs for collaboration and knowledge management are an example of this type of technologies. Employees may use blogs for internal and external communication, but this study focuses on acceptance of corporate weblogs as tools for internal communication, collaboration, and knowledge management, where employees share their opinions and knowledge within the boundaries of the organization (Iglesias-Pradas, Hernández-García, & Fernández-Cardador, 2014). Corporate blogs are Web 2.0 tools and, as such, apart from the utilitarian component, their use relies heavily in the social component, especially because knowledge management is a complex social process (IglesiasPradas, Hernández-García, & Fernández-Cardador, 2015). Prevalent acceptance and use studies only describe net effects of predicting latent variables on system use. These studies build on nomological networks representing the different concepts and their
☆ The authors thank Ángel F. Agudo-Peregrina, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Julián Chaparro-Peláez, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, and two anonymous reviewers for the comments and suggestions on this research. ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (Á. Hernández-García), [email protected] (S. Iglesias-Pradas), [email protected] (P. Fernández-Cardador).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2015.10.130 0148-2963/© 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
relationships, but the studies give little or no information about causation. Furthermore, these studies fail to assess different possible combinations of conditions that may cause acceptance or refusal of a technology. This study offers a new approach to the study of corporate blog acceptance and aims to complement existing theory by highlighting conjunctural causal relations among variables leading to corporate blog adoption—and rejection—in companies. This approach allows deriving direct implications and practical recommendations from the findings that may help to understand the adoption process and to improve corporate blog acceptance for collaboration and knowledge management in organizations. The structure of this study is as follows: Section 2 builds the theoretical framework and identifies the study's independent and dependent variables—or, in QCA terms, the conditions and outcomes, respectively; Section 3 explains the research methods and presents the main results of the study; Section 4 discusses the findings and the theoretical and practical implications.
2. Theoretical framework and study variables Iglesias-Pradas et al. (2015) propose a model to study the adoption of corporate Web 2.0 tools. In their model, the authors depart from traditional acceptance models that aim to explain the antecedents of behavioral intention—perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, or subjective norms—and focus on the validity of behavioral intention and two social factors—perceived critical mass and social anxiety—as predictors of actual knowledge acquisition and creation behaviors. This study follows Iglesias-Pradas et al.'s model to find causal recipes for acceptance and refusal of corporate blogs for collaboration and knowledge management.
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2.1. Behavioral intention and use behaviors Behavioral intention refers to a person's subjective probability that he or she will perform a behavior (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975, p. 288). In this study, intention refers to the degree to which employees believe that they will use corporate blogs as collaborative tools for knowledge management. According to the theory of reasoned action (TRA) (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975), behavioral intention is the best predictor of subsequent performance of a behavior. Although some authors question the link between behavioral intention and behavior (Bagozzi, 2007; Turner, Kitchenham, Brereton, Charters, & Budgen, 2010), literature on technology acceptance generally relies on this assumption. For instance, Iglesias-Pradas, Hernández-García, and Fernández-Cardador (2013) confirm that behavioral intention predicts corporate blogs' use for knowledge creation and acquisition. 2.2. Critical mass Individuals' adoption of collaborative technologies requires that two or more people use the system, to create value for the organization. The intrinsic value of a collaborative technology is higher as the number of users increase (Kraut, Rice, Cool, & Fish, 1998). The theory of critical mass (Markus, 1987) postulates that the actions and relations within an individual's social system partly determine the value of interactive communication systems. Analogously, an individual action such as system abandonment may also change the intrinsic value of the system for the rest of users and potential adopters (Kraut et al., 1998). The concept of critical mass relates to this idea. Critical mass refers to the point where enough people use an innovation so that a small increase in the adoption rate makes the process self-sustainable (Rogers, 1995). Prescott and Conger (1995) argue that determining the exact critical mass for a specific technology is difficult. Lou, Luo, and Strong (2000) add that the perception of whether an innovation attracts a critical mass of users affects adoption and use of that innovation. Lou et al. (2000) and Van Slyke, Ilie, Lou and Stafford (2007) call this perception perceived critical mass. Perceived critical mass may thereby act as a proxy for critical mass; perceived critical mass positively affects corporate blog acceptance and use. 2.3. Social anxiety Social anxiety is a cognitive and affective response. Fear to a potential negative outcome in a social exchange process is the main characteristic of this response. Social exchanges refer to situations where people are or can be the center of attention of others, like when people engage in a conversation, write an e-mail, etc. Some individuals may experience social anxiety when these interactions happen or when they imagine social exchanges (Schlenker & Leary, 1982). The use of knowledge management systems entails sharing information with a potential large audience, which causes social exposition of authors and contributors—in corporate blogs, when users write posts and/or comments—because people are sharing their knowledge, and even opinions and personal emotions (Nardi, Schiano, Gumbrecht, & Swartz, 2004). Corporate blog users present themselves to the rest of the organization and try to convey an impression of themselves that they consider adequate for their interests. Therefore, if users perceive that the response they receive does not correspond to the impression they want to give, social anxiety may appear and cause refusal to use the system. 2.4. Technical and managerial support The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) (Venkatesh, Morris, Davis, & Davis, 2003) and UTAUT2 (Venkatesh, Thong, & Xu, 2012) propose that, in addition to behavioral intention,
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facilitating conditions also affect use behavior. Facilitating conditions are individuals' perceptions of whether an organizational and technical infrastructure exists to support the use of the system. From this definition, two different layers of organizational supporting structures exist: technical and managerial support. Organizations provide users with technology support by means of resources (i.e., technical infrastructure) (Weill & Broadbent, 1998) and technical support (Igbaria & Iivari, 1995). Technical support acts as an extrinsic motivator to foster use of new technologies and systems (Scott & Walczak, 2009). Prior studies argue that higher levels of technical support favor new systems' adoption (Fuerst & Cheney, 1982; Igbaria, 1993; Lucas, 1978), and Bhattacherjee and Hikmet (2008) state that low levels of technical support can have negative consequences in the adoption process. Fuerst and Cheney (1982), and Lucas (1978) further indicate that lack of organizational support is a barrier for use, and Brown, Dennis, and Venkatesh (2010) add that lack of technical support resources has a negative effect on the use of collaborative technologies. Managerial support refers to upper management's level of commitment to the implementation and use of a technology according to an individual's viewpoint (Venkatesh & Bala, 2008). Jasperson, Carter, and Zmud (2005) suggest that upper management may stimulate and influence employees to use a system. Conversely, lack of managerial support may act as a barrier to adoption (Fuerst & Cheney, 1982; Lucas, 1978). Web 2.0 collaborative technologies may cause profound changes in organizations, and managerial commitment, communication, and support are key to legitimate the adoption process across the whole organization and make that process credible to employees. 3. Method and results The study used fsQCA (fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis). FsQCA facilitates assessment of several different sets and combinations of causal conditions leading to the same outcome (Rihoux, 2006). FsQCA also allows observing necessary and sufficient conditions for a given phenomenon. By so doing, fsQCA is capable of unveiling patterns and structures while taking into account interaction effects among variables and asymmetric relationships. Hence, fsQCA covers identification of conjunctural causal relations that may lead to acceptance or rejection of corporate blogs. This advantage is especially relevant because prior research focuses primarily in acceptance behaviors, but rarely on refusal behaviors (Sanford & Oh, 2010). The means to investigate these causal relations in this study is fsQCA of two different groups: Cohort 1 includes participants from the original sample set from Iglesias-Pradas et al. (2013). Cohort 2 comprises a heterogeneous set of employees from different companies and sectors from a pool of first-degree LinkedIn professional contacts of six Information Systems' professors at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, including heads of department of technological companies. This selection allows observing general behaviors, including positive and negative cases—cohort 2—and relevant negative cases—cohort 1, an example of organization with low adoption rates. All participants responded to an anonymous online questionnaire. The questionnaire randomly ordered sets of items to mitigate order effects, reduce the negative effect of item order on theoretical testing, and reduce the potential for response sets (Westaby & Braithwaite, 2003). 140 respondents (41 in the first cohort, and 99 in the second) completed the questionnaire. The measurement instrument of the different variables included an adaptation from previously validated scales for perceived critical mass, behavioral intention, managerial support, and technical support in a seven-point Likert scale, and social anxiety in a five-point Likert scale. Questions about number of hours per week reading corporate blogs measured knowledge-acquisition behavior, and number of posts and comments per week measured knowledge-creation behavior. Operationalization of dependent variables (conditions) required an exploratory factor analysis to calculate the values of the latent variables
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Table 1 Descriptive statistics of conditions and outcomes of the first cohort (N = 41). Variable
Code
Mean (calib.)
Std. dev. (calib.)
Minimum calib.
Maximum calib.
Management support Technical support Behavioral intention Perceived critical mass Knowledge acquisition Knowledge creation Social anxiety
fsmsup fssupp fsbint fspcm fskacq fskcre fssanx
4.03 (0.50) 4.11 (0.65) 4.29 (0.58) 3.34 (0.36) 0.79 (0.34) N/A⁎ (0.23) 2.75 (0.42)
1.30 (0.28) 1.29 (0.25) 1.36 (0.28) 1.29 (0.27) 0.65 (0.25) N/A⁎ (0.31) 1.04 (0.31)
0.03 0.12 0.03 0.03 0.02 0.05 0.02
0.96 0.97 0.96 0.92 0.82 1 0.98
⁎ This measure combines posting and commenting activity.
from their indicators. A partial least squares analysis helped performing the exploratory factor analysis to consider the relative weight of each indicator. 3.1. Calibration of variables Calibration of variables into conditions and outcomes is a critical step in fsQCA analysis because calibration determines the final fuzzy-set scores for conditions and variables. Two possibilities emerged for the conditions of the two datasets of this study: data-dependent calibration and dataindependent calibration. The first one uses the median of variables as cross-over point, approximately the lowest value of the top 5–10% as 0.95 and, conversely, the highest value of the lower 5–10% as 0.05; this calibration leads to different values for different datasets. Because the conditions are composite variables and items measuring the variables are scales, the second option is to assign the central value of the scale as the cross-over point, and values around the 90% and 10% of the maximum possible value to full membership and full non-membership. This study used the second procedure because that procedure results in comparable membership scores across both datasets for the main conditions for adoption and refusal of corporate blog use. Furthermore, scales refer to the central value as “neither agree nor disagree,” which reflects perfectly the idea of membership indetermination. Calibration of the outcomes followed from opinions of heads of department about relevant values. The cross-over point for knowledge acquisition was 1 hour a week, with 5 hours or more indicating full membership and less than 12 min a week—approximately 1 hour a month—indicating full non-membership; in the case of knowledge creation, one post or one comment per week was the cross-over point, more than 5 posts or comments a week implied full membership, and no comments or posts indicated full nonmembership. Inspection of data revealed that more than 70% of the participants in cohort 1 and around 50% of the participants in cohort 2 declared that they never posted or commented anything in the company's blogs. Tables 1 and 2 show the main statistics of conditions and outcomes before and after calibration of each dataset. 3.2. fsQCA analysis The study covered fsQCA analysis of both cohorts and included affirmed and negated versions of knowledge acquisition and creation (indicating acceptance and refusal behaviors, respectively) as outcomes.
The study considered that either posting or commenting represent knowledge-creation activity (i.e., in fsQCA terms, the value of knowledge creation was the logical or of the score of number of posts and the score of number of comments). The codification of cases in the truth table deleted possible cases with no occurrences, and set the outcome value to 1 in rows that had consistency values higher than 0.85 in the truth table. Table 3 displays the intermediate results of the fsQCA analysis for the two cohorts, with knowledge acquisition and diffusion (and their negated versions) as outcomes. The intermediate solution included the following counterfactuals for conditions deriving from theory (see Section 2): perceived critical mass, behavioral intention, technical support, managerial support (present), and social anxiety (absent), for the affirmative version of outcomes (i.e., acceptance), and their opposite versions for the negated outcomes (i.e., refusal).
3.3. Results Observation of data confirms that the degree of corporate blog adoption in the first cohort is very low. This result is relevant because that analysis might lead to a much better understanding of refusal behaviors than that of adoption behaviors. However, despite the relatively low solution coverage and consistency values, the results of the intermediate solution show that all casual recipes for knowledge acquisition include behavioral intention, which suggests that behavioral intention might be a necessary but not sufficient condition (see that the upper left quarter of the XY plot in Fig. 1 is nearly empty). Regarding knowledge creation, the intermediate solution includes only one causal recipe showing the conjunction of all conditions deriving from theory, but this solution has very low consistency and coverage. A more interesting result arises from the analysis of refusal behaviors: The intermediate solution emphasizes the relevance of the role of perceived critical mass and social anxiety in refusal to use corporate blogs, with high values of coverage and consistency. Fig. 2 displays the XY plot for presence of social anxiety or absence of perceived critical mass as conditions and absence of knowledge acquisition as outcome. From Fig. 2, the causal recipe shows high sufficiency. Furthermore, raw coverage and unique coverage of perceived critical mass indicate that lack of perceived critical mass may play a fundamental role in the refusal to use corporate blogs for knowledge acquisition.
Table 2 Descriptive statistics of conditions and outcomes of the second cohort (N = 99). Variable
Code
Mean (calib.)
Std. dev. (calib.)
Minimum calib.
Maximum calib.
Management support Technical support Behavioral intention Perceived critical mass Knowledge acquisition Knowledge creation Social anxiety
fsmsup fssupp fsbint fspcm fskacq fskcre fssanx
4.37 (0.59) 4.39 (0.59) 4.83 (0.68) 3.79 (0.45) 1.98 (0.55) N/A⁎ (0.48) 2.69 (0.40)
1.37 (0.28) 1.53 (0.31) 1.31 (0.26) 1.47 (0.31) 2.37 (0.26) N/A⁎ (0.40) 0.81 (0.27)
0.03 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.02 0.05 0.02
0.97 0.97 0.97 0.97 1 1 0.98
⁎ This measure combines posting and commenting activity.
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Table 3 Intermediate solutions. Outcome
Raw cover.
Unique cover.
Consist.
Sol. cover.
Sol. consis.
Intermediate solution (cohort 1) fskacq† fssanx* ~ fsmsup*fsbint ~fssupp*fssanx*fsbint fssupp*fspcm*fsmsup*fsbint ~fskacq ~fspcm fssanx †† fskcre fsbint*fssupp* ~ fssanx*fspcm*fsmsup ~fskcre ~fspcm fssanx
0.43 0.47 0.61 0.79 0.54 0.55 0.72 0.46
0.02 0.02 0.23 0.32 0.07 0.55 0.35 0.09
0.68 0.76 0.70 0.81 0.85 0.49 0.87 0.84
0.76
0.68
0.86
0.79
0.55 0.81
0.49 0.86
Intermediate solution (cohort 2) fskacq fssupp* ~ fssanx*fsmsup fssupp* ~ fssanx*fsbint ~fssanx*fspcm*fsbint ~fskacq fssupp* ~ fspcm ~fssupp*fsbint fssanx* ~ fspcm* ~ fsmsup fskcre† ~fssanx*fspcm*fsbint ~fskcre fssupp* ~ fspcm* ~ fsbint fssanx* ~ fspcm* ~ fsmsup ~fssupp* ~ fsmsup*fsbint ~fssupp* ~ fspcm*fsbint fssupp* ~ fspcm* ~ fsmsup ~fspcm* ~ fsmsup*fsbint
0.68 0.71 0.64 0.58 0.52 0.35 0.62 0.40 0.35 0.42 0.47 0.46 0.52
0.01 0.04 0.05 0.16 0.14 0.03 0.62 0.02 0.03 0.02 0.04 0.00 0.01
0.81 0.80 0.84 0.78 0.75 0.95 0.72 0.89 0.95 0.85 0.80 0.84 0.83
0.78
0.77
0.77
0.72
0.62 0.69
0.72 0.79
† ††
Causal recipes
Indicates consistency cutoffs lower than 0.85. Indicates consistency cutoffs lower than 0.5.
The results of the analysis of data from the second cohort give further insight on corporate blog adoption and refusal, by establishing more complex solutions than the analysis of data from the first cohort, except in the case of knowledge creation. However, consistency of the
different solutions is slightly below and over the 0.74 that Ragin (2008) proposes for a model to be informative (Woodside, 2013), and therefore readers should take the results with caution, especially those relative to corporate blog adoption for knowledge creation.
Fig. 1. The XY plot of behavioral intention and knowledge acquisition (first cohort) suggests that behavioral intention may be a necessary condition for corporate blog adoption.
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Fig. 2. The XY plot of social anxiety, (negated) perceived critical mass, and (negated) knowledge acquisition (first cohort) suggests high sufficiency of the causal recipe.
Contrary to cohort 1, most of the solutions include technical and managerial support in conjunction with the other three conditions. More particularly, technical support in conjunction with either managerial support or behavioral intention favor adoption of corporate blogs. Furthermore, the presence of technical support in the absence of perceived critical mass or absence of technical support when employees have intention to use the system deter corporate blog use for knowledge acquisition. Interestingly, lack of social anxiety arises as necessary condition for knowledge acquisition, and the conjoint action of behavioral intention, perceived critical mass, and lack of social anxiety may foster knowledge creation behaviors.
4. Discussion This study offers insight into acceptance and refusal of corporate blogs for knowledge sharing in companies and complements the results of Iglesias-Pradas et al. (2013). This study makes a significant methodological contribution by exploring critical paths of acceptance and, more important, refusal of corporate blogs. From a theoretical standpoint, this research also introduces two additional relevant variables from technology acceptance literature affecting use behaviors: technical and managerial support. From the results, in low-adoption organizations, either lack of perceived critical mass or social anxiety alone may trigger corporate blog refusal for both behaviors. This result, together with the importance of lack of social anxiety on knowledge-acquisition behaviors, should point managers toward the promotion of initiatives aiming to achieve critical mass (see Iglesias-Pradas et al., 2015, p. 1485, for some examples), and to train and improve social skills of their employees, as a means to stimulate corporate blog use.
The results also show that behavioral intention might be an important condition for knowledge-acquisition behaviors—a necessary condition in low-adoption contexts—but mere intention is not enough to drive employees into system use (other conditions, such as perceiving that a critical mass of users exists, may be more relevant in this regard). The study does not confirm, either, whether lack of behavioral intention may directly lead to corporate blog use rejection. One way managers may increase intention to use corporate blogs is giving more freedom to employees and putting the focus on communities with shared interests and goals instead of the individual (Zhou, 2011). A main caveat of this study are the relatively low consistency values in some cases. Therefore, some models might not be informative enough. In addition, some choices about sample selection and calibration might be debatable. Sample selection somehow limits the generalizability of results: cohort 2 covers a large spectrum of adopters and non-adopters among Spanish companies, but most participants are employees of large IT organizations. Although the findings from the study may approximately reflect the current situation in Spain, where the use of corporate blogs for internal communication, collaboration, and knowledge management is only significant in large multinational companies, incorporating organizational values and culture to the study might provide different, and probably richer, results. These foreseeable differences strongly encourage cross-cultural validation of the results. Regarding calibration, this study considers higher, lower, and medium-scale values for calibration of conditions; using a cohort-dependent calibration with the median values as cross-over point might lead to different results. On the other hand, calibration of outcomes depends on manager opinions about observed reading, posting, and commenting behaviors; a more precise calibration would entail knowledge of actual data about reading, posting, or commenting behaviors at national or global levels.
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Journal of Business Research
Causal recipes for acceptance and refusal of corporate blogs☆ Ángel Hernández-García ⁎, Santiago Iglesias-Pradas, Pedro Fernández-Cardador Ingeniería de Organización, Administración de Empresas y Estadística, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Av. Complutense 30, 28040 Madrid, Spain
a r t i c l e
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Article history: Received 1 February 2015 Received in revised form 1 July 2015 Accepted 1 September 2015 Available online 26 October 2015 Keywords: Corporate blogs Acceptance Refusal Fuzzy sets Qualitative comparative analysis fsQCA
a b s t r a c t This study proposes an alternative approach to the study of technology acceptance and refusal behaviors in organizations. Whereas traditional technology acceptance studies focus on structural modeling and the explanation of net effects, this research investigates the different conjunctural causal relations among variables affecting adoption that lead to acceptance or refusal to use corporate blogs in companies for knowledge-sharing purposes. The research includes five conditions—behavioral intention, perceived critical mass, social anxiety, technical support, and managerial support—and uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to observe how these conditions affect four different outcomes: presence and absence of knowledge-creation and knowledge-acquisition behaviors, respectively. The results complement prior studies and provide insight on how corporate blog acceptance and refusal processes operate. © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction Technology acceptance studies usually adopt a utilitarian view of technology adoption by individuals within organizations. This approach is valid when studies focus on the analysis of productivity systems or when the reason to use a technology depends heavily on expected benefits. However, purely utilitarian approaches to acceptance of some other technologies may be incomplete. Corporate blogs for collaboration and knowledge management are an example of this type of technologies. Employees may use blogs for internal and external communication, but this study focuses on acceptance of corporate weblogs as tools for internal communication, collaboration, and knowledge management, where employees share their opinions and knowledge within the boundaries of the organization (Iglesias-Pradas, Hernández-García, & Fernández-Cardador, 2014). Corporate blogs are Web 2.0 tools and, as such, apart from the utilitarian component, their use relies heavily in the social component, especially because knowledge management is a complex social process (IglesiasPradas, Hernández-García, & Fernández-Cardador, 2015). Prevalent acceptance and use studies only describe net effects of predicting latent variables on system use. These studies build on nomological networks representing the different concepts and their
☆ The authors thank Ángel F. Agudo-Peregrina, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Julián Chaparro-Peláez, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, and two anonymous reviewers for the comments and suggestions on this research. ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (Á. Hernández-García), [email protected] (S. Iglesias-Pradas), [email protected] (P. Fernández-Cardador).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2015.10.130 0148-2963/© 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
relationships, but the studies give little or no information about causation. Furthermore, these studies fail to assess different possible combinations of conditions that may cause acceptance or refusal of a technology. This study offers a new approach to the study of corporate blog acceptance and aims to complement existing theory by highlighting conjunctural causal relations among variables leading to corporate blog adoption—and rejection—in companies. This approach allows deriving direct implications and practical recommendations from the findings that may help to understand the adoption process and to improve corporate blog acceptance for collaboration and knowledge management in organizations. The structure of this study is as follows: Section 2 builds the theoretical framework and identifies the study's independent and dependent variables—or, in QCA terms, the conditions and outcomes, respectively; Section 3 explains the research methods and presents the main results of the study; Section 4 discusses the findings and the theoretical and practical implications.
2. Theoretical framework and study variables Iglesias-Pradas et al. (2015) propose a model to study the adoption of corporate Web 2.0 tools. In their model, the authors depart from traditional acceptance models that aim to explain the antecedents of behavioral intention—perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, or subjective norms—and focus on the validity of behavioral intention and two social factors—perceived critical mass and social anxiety—as predictors of actual knowledge acquisition and creation behaviors. This study follows Iglesias-Pradas et al.'s model to find causal recipes for acceptance and refusal of corporate blogs for collaboration and knowledge management.
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2.1. Behavioral intention and use behaviors Behavioral intention refers to a person's subjective probability that he or she will perform a behavior (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975, p. 288). In this study, intention refers to the degree to which employees believe that they will use corporate blogs as collaborative tools for knowledge management. According to the theory of reasoned action (TRA) (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975), behavioral intention is the best predictor of subsequent performance of a behavior. Although some authors question the link between behavioral intention and behavior (Bagozzi, 2007; Turner, Kitchenham, Brereton, Charters, & Budgen, 2010), literature on technology acceptance generally relies on this assumption. For instance, Iglesias-Pradas, Hernández-García, and Fernández-Cardador (2013) confirm that behavioral intention predicts corporate blogs' use for knowledge creation and acquisition. 2.2. Critical mass Individuals' adoption of collaborative technologies requires that two or more people use the system, to create value for the organization. The intrinsic value of a collaborative technology is higher as the number of users increase (Kraut, Rice, Cool, & Fish, 1998). The theory of critical mass (Markus, 1987) postulates that the actions and relations within an individual's social system partly determine the value of interactive communication systems. Analogously, an individual action such as system abandonment may also change the intrinsic value of the system for the rest of users and potential adopters (Kraut et al., 1998). The concept of critical mass relates to this idea. Critical mass refers to the point where enough people use an innovation so that a small increase in the adoption rate makes the process self-sustainable (Rogers, 1995). Prescott and Conger (1995) argue that determining the exact critical mass for a specific technology is difficult. Lou, Luo, and Strong (2000) add that the perception of whether an innovation attracts a critical mass of users affects adoption and use of that innovation. Lou et al. (2000) and Van Slyke, Ilie, Lou and Stafford (2007) call this perception perceived critical mass. Perceived critical mass may thereby act as a proxy for critical mass; perceived critical mass positively affects corporate blog acceptance and use. 2.3. Social anxiety Social anxiety is a cognitive and affective response. Fear to a potential negative outcome in a social exchange process is the main characteristic of this response. Social exchanges refer to situations where people are or can be the center of attention of others, like when people engage in a conversation, write an e-mail, etc. Some individuals may experience social anxiety when these interactions happen or when they imagine social exchanges (Schlenker & Leary, 1982). The use of knowledge management systems entails sharing information with a potential large audience, which causes social exposition of authors and contributors—in corporate blogs, when users write posts and/or comments—because people are sharing their knowledge, and even opinions and personal emotions (Nardi, Schiano, Gumbrecht, & Swartz, 2004). Corporate blog users present themselves to the rest of the organization and try to convey an impression of themselves that they consider adequate for their interests. Therefore, if users perceive that the response they receive does not correspond to the impression they want to give, social anxiety may appear and cause refusal to use the system. 2.4. Technical and managerial support The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) (Venkatesh, Morris, Davis, & Davis, 2003) and UTAUT2 (Venkatesh, Thong, & Xu, 2012) propose that, in addition to behavioral intention,
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facilitating conditions also affect use behavior. Facilitating conditions are individuals' perceptions of whether an organizational and technical infrastructure exists to support the use of the system. From this definition, two different layers of organizational supporting structures exist: technical and managerial support. Organizations provide users with technology support by means of resources (i.e., technical infrastructure) (Weill & Broadbent, 1998) and technical support (Igbaria & Iivari, 1995). Technical support acts as an extrinsic motivator to foster use of new technologies and systems (Scott & Walczak, 2009). Prior studies argue that higher levels of technical support favor new systems' adoption (Fuerst & Cheney, 1982; Igbaria, 1993; Lucas, 1978), and Bhattacherjee and Hikmet (2008) state that low levels of technical support can have negative consequences in the adoption process. Fuerst and Cheney (1982), and Lucas (1978) further indicate that lack of organizational support is a barrier for use, and Brown, Dennis, and Venkatesh (2010) add that lack of technical support resources has a negative effect on the use of collaborative technologies. Managerial support refers to upper management's level of commitment to the implementation and use of a technology according to an individual's viewpoint (Venkatesh & Bala, 2008). Jasperson, Carter, and Zmud (2005) suggest that upper management may stimulate and influence employees to use a system. Conversely, lack of managerial support may act as a barrier to adoption (Fuerst & Cheney, 1982; Lucas, 1978). Web 2.0 collaborative technologies may cause profound changes in organizations, and managerial commitment, communication, and support are key to legitimate the adoption process across the whole organization and make that process credible to employees. 3. Method and results The study used fsQCA (fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis). FsQCA facilitates assessment of several different sets and combinations of causal conditions leading to the same outcome (Rihoux, 2006). FsQCA also allows observing necessary and sufficient conditions for a given phenomenon. By so doing, fsQCA is capable of unveiling patterns and structures while taking into account interaction effects among variables and asymmetric relationships. Hence, fsQCA covers identification of conjunctural causal relations that may lead to acceptance or rejection of corporate blogs. This advantage is especially relevant because prior research focuses primarily in acceptance behaviors, but rarely on refusal behaviors (Sanford & Oh, 2010). The means to investigate these causal relations in this study is fsQCA of two different groups: Cohort 1 includes participants from the original sample set from Iglesias-Pradas et al. (2013). Cohort 2 comprises a heterogeneous set of employees from different companies and sectors from a pool of first-degree LinkedIn professional contacts of six Information Systems' professors at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, including heads of department of technological companies. This selection allows observing general behaviors, including positive and negative cases—cohort 2—and relevant negative cases—cohort 1, an example of organization with low adoption rates. All participants responded to an anonymous online questionnaire. The questionnaire randomly ordered sets of items to mitigate order effects, reduce the negative effect of item order on theoretical testing, and reduce the potential for response sets (Westaby & Braithwaite, 2003). 140 respondents (41 in the first cohort, and 99 in the second) completed the questionnaire. The measurement instrument of the different variables included an adaptation from previously validated scales for perceived critical mass, behavioral intention, managerial support, and technical support in a seven-point Likert scale, and social anxiety in a five-point Likert scale. Questions about number of hours per week reading corporate blogs measured knowledge-acquisition behavior, and number of posts and comments per week measured knowledge-creation behavior. Operationalization of dependent variables (conditions) required an exploratory factor analysis to calculate the values of the latent variables
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Table 1 Descriptive statistics of conditions and outcomes of the first cohort (N = 41). Variable
Code
Mean (calib.)
Std. dev. (calib.)
Minimum calib.
Maximum calib.
Management support Technical support Behavioral intention Perceived critical mass Knowledge acquisition Knowledge creation Social anxiety
fsmsup fssupp fsbint fspcm fskacq fskcre fssanx
4.03 (0.50) 4.11 (0.65) 4.29 (0.58) 3.34 (0.36) 0.79 (0.34) N/A⁎ (0.23) 2.75 (0.42)
1.30 (0.28) 1.29 (0.25) 1.36 (0.28) 1.29 (0.27) 0.65 (0.25) N/A⁎ (0.31) 1.04 (0.31)
0.03 0.12 0.03 0.03 0.02 0.05 0.02
0.96 0.97 0.96 0.92 0.82 1 0.98
⁎ This measure combines posting and commenting activity.
from their indicators. A partial least squares analysis helped performing the exploratory factor analysis to consider the relative weight of each indicator. 3.1. Calibration of variables Calibration of variables into conditions and outcomes is a critical step in fsQCA analysis because calibration determines the final fuzzy-set scores for conditions and variables. Two possibilities emerged for the conditions of the two datasets of this study: data-dependent calibration and dataindependent calibration. The first one uses the median of variables as cross-over point, approximately the lowest value of the top 5–10% as 0.95 and, conversely, the highest value of the lower 5–10% as 0.05; this calibration leads to different values for different datasets. Because the conditions are composite variables and items measuring the variables are scales, the second option is to assign the central value of the scale as the cross-over point, and values around the 90% and 10% of the maximum possible value to full membership and full non-membership. This study used the second procedure because that procedure results in comparable membership scores across both datasets for the main conditions for adoption and refusal of corporate blog use. Furthermore, scales refer to the central value as “neither agree nor disagree,” which reflects perfectly the idea of membership indetermination. Calibration of the outcomes followed from opinions of heads of department about relevant values. The cross-over point for knowledge acquisition was 1 hour a week, with 5 hours or more indicating full membership and less than 12 min a week—approximately 1 hour a month—indicating full non-membership; in the case of knowledge creation, one post or one comment per week was the cross-over point, more than 5 posts or comments a week implied full membership, and no comments or posts indicated full nonmembership. Inspection of data revealed that more than 70% of the participants in cohort 1 and around 50% of the participants in cohort 2 declared that they never posted or commented anything in the company's blogs. Tables 1 and 2 show the main statistics of conditions and outcomes before and after calibration of each dataset. 3.2. fsQCA analysis The study covered fsQCA analysis of both cohorts and included affirmed and negated versions of knowledge acquisition and creation (indicating acceptance and refusal behaviors, respectively) as outcomes.
The study considered that either posting or commenting represent knowledge-creation activity (i.e., in fsQCA terms, the value of knowledge creation was the logical or of the score of number of posts and the score of number of comments). The codification of cases in the truth table deleted possible cases with no occurrences, and set the outcome value to 1 in rows that had consistency values higher than 0.85 in the truth table. Table 3 displays the intermediate results of the fsQCA analysis for the two cohorts, with knowledge acquisition and diffusion (and their negated versions) as outcomes. The intermediate solution included the following counterfactuals for conditions deriving from theory (see Section 2): perceived critical mass, behavioral intention, technical support, managerial support (present), and social anxiety (absent), for the affirmative version of outcomes (i.e., acceptance), and their opposite versions for the negated outcomes (i.e., refusal).
3.3. Results Observation of data confirms that the degree of corporate blog adoption in the first cohort is very low. This result is relevant because that analysis might lead to a much better understanding of refusal behaviors than that of adoption behaviors. However, despite the relatively low solution coverage and consistency values, the results of the intermediate solution show that all casual recipes for knowledge acquisition include behavioral intention, which suggests that behavioral intention might be a necessary but not sufficient condition (see that the upper left quarter of the XY plot in Fig. 1 is nearly empty). Regarding knowledge creation, the intermediate solution includes only one causal recipe showing the conjunction of all conditions deriving from theory, but this solution has very low consistency and coverage. A more interesting result arises from the analysis of refusal behaviors: The intermediate solution emphasizes the relevance of the role of perceived critical mass and social anxiety in refusal to use corporate blogs, with high values of coverage and consistency. Fig. 2 displays the XY plot for presence of social anxiety or absence of perceived critical mass as conditions and absence of knowledge acquisition as outcome. From Fig. 2, the causal recipe shows high sufficiency. Furthermore, raw coverage and unique coverage of perceived critical mass indicate that lack of perceived critical mass may play a fundamental role in the refusal to use corporate blogs for knowledge acquisition.
Table 2 Descriptive statistics of conditions and outcomes of the second cohort (N = 99). Variable
Code
Mean (calib.)
Std. dev. (calib.)
Minimum calib.
Maximum calib.
Management support Technical support Behavioral intention Perceived critical mass Knowledge acquisition Knowledge creation Social anxiety
fsmsup fssupp fsbint fspcm fskacq fskcre fssanx
4.37 (0.59) 4.39 (0.59) 4.83 (0.68) 3.79 (0.45) 1.98 (0.55) N/A⁎ (0.48) 2.69 (0.40)
1.37 (0.28) 1.53 (0.31) 1.31 (0.26) 1.47 (0.31) 2.37 (0.26) N/A⁎ (0.40) 0.81 (0.27)
0.03 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.02 0.05 0.02
0.97 0.97 0.97 0.97 1 1 0.98
⁎ This measure combines posting and commenting activity.
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Table 3 Intermediate solutions. Outcome
Raw cover.
Unique cover.
Consist.
Sol. cover.
Sol. consis.
Intermediate solution (cohort 1) fskacq† fssanx* ~ fsmsup*fsbint ~fssupp*fssanx*fsbint fssupp*fspcm*fsmsup*fsbint ~fskacq ~fspcm fssanx †† fskcre fsbint*fssupp* ~ fssanx*fspcm*fsmsup ~fskcre ~fspcm fssanx
0.43 0.47 0.61 0.79 0.54 0.55 0.72 0.46
0.02 0.02 0.23 0.32 0.07 0.55 0.35 0.09
0.68 0.76 0.70 0.81 0.85 0.49 0.87 0.84
0.76
0.68
0.86
0.79
0.55 0.81
0.49 0.86
Intermediate solution (cohort 2) fskacq fssupp* ~ fssanx*fsmsup fssupp* ~ fssanx*fsbint ~fssanx*fspcm*fsbint ~fskacq fssupp* ~ fspcm ~fssupp*fsbint fssanx* ~ fspcm* ~ fsmsup fskcre† ~fssanx*fspcm*fsbint ~fskcre fssupp* ~ fspcm* ~ fsbint fssanx* ~ fspcm* ~ fsmsup ~fssupp* ~ fsmsup*fsbint ~fssupp* ~ fspcm*fsbint fssupp* ~ fspcm* ~ fsmsup ~fspcm* ~ fsmsup*fsbint
0.68 0.71 0.64 0.58 0.52 0.35 0.62 0.40 0.35 0.42 0.47 0.46 0.52
0.01 0.04 0.05 0.16 0.14 0.03 0.62 0.02 0.03 0.02 0.04 0.00 0.01
0.81 0.80 0.84 0.78 0.75 0.95 0.72 0.89 0.95 0.85 0.80 0.84 0.83
0.78
0.77
0.77
0.72
0.62 0.69
0.72 0.79
† ††
Causal recipes
Indicates consistency cutoffs lower than 0.85. Indicates consistency cutoffs lower than 0.5.
The results of the analysis of data from the second cohort give further insight on corporate blog adoption and refusal, by establishing more complex solutions than the analysis of data from the first cohort, except in the case of knowledge creation. However, consistency of the
different solutions is slightly below and over the 0.74 that Ragin (2008) proposes for a model to be informative (Woodside, 2013), and therefore readers should take the results with caution, especially those relative to corporate blog adoption for knowledge creation.
Fig. 1. The XY plot of behavioral intention and knowledge acquisition (first cohort) suggests that behavioral intention may be a necessary condition for corporate blog adoption.
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Fig. 2. The XY plot of social anxiety, (negated) perceived critical mass, and (negated) knowledge acquisition (first cohort) suggests high sufficiency of the causal recipe.
Contrary to cohort 1, most of the solutions include technical and managerial support in conjunction with the other three conditions. More particularly, technical support in conjunction with either managerial support or behavioral intention favor adoption of corporate blogs. Furthermore, the presence of technical support in the absence of perceived critical mass or absence of technical support when employees have intention to use the system deter corporate blog use for knowledge acquisition. Interestingly, lack of social anxiety arises as necessary condition for knowledge acquisition, and the conjoint action of behavioral intention, perceived critical mass, and lack of social anxiety may foster knowledge creation behaviors.
4. Discussion This study offers insight into acceptance and refusal of corporate blogs for knowledge sharing in companies and complements the results of Iglesias-Pradas et al. (2013). This study makes a significant methodological contribution by exploring critical paths of acceptance and, more important, refusal of corporate blogs. From a theoretical standpoint, this research also introduces two additional relevant variables from technology acceptance literature affecting use behaviors: technical and managerial support. From the results, in low-adoption organizations, either lack of perceived critical mass or social anxiety alone may trigger corporate blog refusal for both behaviors. This result, together with the importance of lack of social anxiety on knowledge-acquisition behaviors, should point managers toward the promotion of initiatives aiming to achieve critical mass (see Iglesias-Pradas et al., 2015, p. 1485, for some examples), and to train and improve social skills of their employees, as a means to stimulate corporate blog use.
The results also show that behavioral intention might be an important condition for knowledge-acquisition behaviors—a necessary condition in low-adoption contexts—but mere intention is not enough to drive employees into system use (other conditions, such as perceiving that a critical mass of users exists, may be more relevant in this regard). The study does not confirm, either, whether lack of behavioral intention may directly lead to corporate blog use rejection. One way managers may increase intention to use corporate blogs is giving more freedom to employees and putting the focus on communities with shared interests and goals instead of the individual (Zhou, 2011). A main caveat of this study are the relatively low consistency values in some cases. Therefore, some models might not be informative enough. In addition, some choices about sample selection and calibration might be debatable. Sample selection somehow limits the generalizability of results: cohort 2 covers a large spectrum of adopters and non-adopters among Spanish companies, but most participants are employees of large IT organizations. Although the findings from the study may approximately reflect the current situation in Spain, where the use of corporate blogs for internal communication, collaboration, and knowledge management is only significant in large multinational companies, incorporating organizational values and culture to the study might provide different, and probably richer, results. These foreseeable differences strongly encourage cross-cultural validation of the results. Regarding calibration, this study considers higher, lower, and medium-scale values for calibration of conditions; using a cohort-dependent calibration with the median values as cross-over point might lead to different results. On the other hand, calibration of outcomes depends on manager opinions about observed reading, posting, and commenting behaviors; a more precise calibration would entail knowledge of actual data about reading, posting, or commenting behaviors at national or global levels.
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