Exploitation And Exploration Of Technology And Task In The Enterprise Systems Post-Acceptance Stage

Over the past decades, firms have increasingly made major investments in enterprise systems (ES) to derive competitive advantages. However, quite a lot of ES implementations are still failing to meet the adopting firms’ expectations. In particular, it is estimated that more than one-third of the firms have not reaped the expected benefits from the implemented systems. In this regard, research on post-acceptance employee behaviors has suggested that employees’ adaptation behaviors to technology and task are the critical factors that would significantly affect the extent to which the firm derives benefits from the system in the post-acceptance stage. Yet, our understanding of what motivates such employees’ adaptation behaviors in the ES post-acceptance stage remains limited.Drawing upon transactional-transformational leadership theory, adaptive structuration theory, and information system literature, we build a multilevel model to examine how group-level leadership styles (i.e., transactional leadership and transformational leadership) affect individual-level employees’technology adaptation (i.e., technology exploitation and technology exploration) and task adaptation (i.e., task exploitation and task exploration) and in turn influence employee job outcomes (i.e., job performance and job satisfaction). Further, by adopting the perspective of regulatory focus theory, we also investigate how employees’ regulatory focus (i.e., prevention focus and promotion focus) moderates the relationships between different leadership styles and different technology adaptation and task adaptation behaviors.The research model is tested by data collected from 214 employees in 56 teams (i.e., business units) at one of the largest financial service companies in China using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM). Our results reveal that both employees’task exploitation and task exploration in the ES post-acceptance stage can significantly improve employees’ job performance and job satisfaction, while the effects of technology exploitation and technology exploration on job performance and job satisfaction are fully mediated by task exploitation and task exploration. The results of HLM indicate that the cross-level effects of both transactional leadership and transformational leadership on technology exploration, task exploitation, and task exploration are significant. However, for technology exploitation, we only find transformational leadership has a positive cross-level impact. Our results further indicate that transactional leadership positively interacts with prevention focus in affecting task exploration. Also, we find that transformational leadership positively interacts with promotion focus in shaping technology exploration and task exploration yet negatively interacts with promotion focus in shaping technology exploitation. Theoretical contributions and managerial implication of this research are also discussed.