Roles of individual perception in technology adoption at organization level: Behavioral model versus toe framework

Abstract

It is generally accepted that two different groups of theories are required in order to explain technology adoption at individual level and at organization level. For individuals, behavioral theories including technology acceptance model (TAM), theory of planned behavior (TPB), unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) are frequently used to predict intention and actual behavior. For organizations, diffusion of innovation (DOI) model and technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework are commonly applied for predicting adoption. While this divide appears to be reasonable, the process of investigating an organization is, inevitably, done through collecting opinions of the people in the organization. This leads to the question how individual’s perception affects the application of DOI and TOE for understanding organizational technology adoption. To extend further, what is an "objective" measure of organizational characteristics and who can provide it? In previous studies, researchers obtain feedback primarily only from decision makers when applying TOE. This paper examines if a decision-maker-centeredTOE analysis is consistent with the results obtained by directly applying behavior model to predict individual decision maker's action, and hence further justify TOE framework application. For this exploratory study, high degree of consistency is observed.