A case study of employees' perception of organizational characteristics, subsequent stress, and new technology acceptance

The purpose of this study was to construct a model to determine the factors that affect the employees' perception to accept new technology.; Recent literature shows that factors contributing to IT success include not only technical factors, but also organizational and human factors. Acknowledging this, users' technology acceptance has become a surrogate measure of IT success than actual system use given that in many organizations, the new technology would be of mandatory nature. Nevertheless, previous studies have focused on narrow aspects of organizational characteristics such as training, supervision, and user's involvement in explaining the technology acceptance variables. Consequently, they have neglected broad aspects of organizational issues and employee's psychological states that may have a potential to influence technology acceptance. Thus, the identification of other factors influencing technology acceptance is called for.; The present study assures that lack of user acceptance has been a barrier to the success of information systems. Consequently, user's acceptance, involving user's perceived ease of use and usefulness of new IT, has become a fundamental part of the IT research.; The present study expands the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), a useful tool for explaining users' attitudes to information technology (IT), by linking some of the organizational characteristics and user's individual characteristics to TAM variables. It introduces several new variables including organizational culture as an organizational characteristic, attitude toward change and stress as individual characteristics in predicting users' technology acceptance. It also employs end-user satisfaction with system characteristics as a correlate of technology acceptance variables.; Data collected from 236 office intranet system users in the IT industry suggest that users' attitude toward change has an impact on the technology acceptance variables, reflecting perceived ease of use, usefulness, and satisfaction of the IT system. However, stress was not found to be significant in the relationship of technology acceptance. This finding may be correlated with the low level of explained variance for stress. Nevertheless, the present study provides a possible relationship between stress and technology acceptance. The results also show that perceived organizational culture has an impact on level of stress, which is consistent with the previous findings.