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Download fileCoping with information technology: mixed emotions, vacillation and non-conforming use patterns
journal contribution
posted on 2015-11-06, 11:22 authored by Mari-Klara Stein, Sue Newell, Erica L. Wagner, Robert GalliersAchieving the promised business benefits of an IT system is intimately tied to the continued incorporation of the system into the work practices it is intended to support. While much is known about different social, cognitive, and technical factors that influence initial adoption and use, less is known about the role of emotional factors in users’ behaviors. Through an in-depth field study conducted in two North American universities, we examine the role of emotions in how specific IT use patterns emerge. We find that there are five different characteristics of an IT stimulus event (cues) that, when interacting in a reinforcing manner, elicit a single class of emotions (uniform affective responses) and, when interacting in an oppositional manner, elicit mixed emotions (ambivalent affective responses). While users respond to uniform emotions with clear adaptation strategies, they deal with ambivalent emotions by combining different adaptation behaviors, a vacillating strategy between emphasizing positive and negative aspects of the stimulus. Surprisingly, these ambivalent emotions and vacillating strategies can lead to active and positive user engagement, exhibited in task and tool adaptation behaviors and improvisational use patterns that, despite their nonconformity to terms of use, can have positive organizational implications.
History
School
- Business and Economics
Department
- Business
Published in
MIS QuarterlyVolume
39Issue
2Pages
367 - 392Citation
STEIN, M-K., ...et al.,2015. Coping with information technology: mixed emotions, vacillation and non-conforming use patterns. MIS Quarterly, 39(2), pp. 367-392.Publisher
University of Minnesota, Management Information Systems Research CenterVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© Management Information Systems Research Center (MISRC) of the University of MinnesotaPublisher statement
This paper was published in the journal MIS Quarterly and is available at https://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol39/iss2/7/.Publication date
2015-06-12ISSN
0276-7783eISSN
2162-9730Publisher version
Language
- en