An Empirical Study Of The Antecedents Of Employees’ Enterprise System Use Behaviors:From The Perspective Of Ambidexterity

Enterprise systems(ES)are an important tool for contemporary firms to achieve operational intelligence and digitization of services.Existing research has shown that employees’ normative ES use behavior determines the extent to which firms and individuals can derive benefits from the implemented systems.As a result,managers are increasingly concerned about how to further promote employees’ normative ES behavior to maximize the value of ESs.In practice,as ES evolves,the types of employees’ ES use behaviors evolve beyond a single type of ES use behavior.Employee s’ ES use behavior may be explorative use or explorative-exploitative use,or nonnormative use(workaround use).Given that employees need to achieve different work goals with their different ES use behaviors,firms are faced with the problem of how to configure the appropriate elements to support employees in their pursuit of different ES use behaviors.Contemporary firms are vertically managed,with authority delegated to different business teams.As a result,employees’ ES use behaviors are influenced not only by their own characteristics but also by team-related characteristics.Theoretically,current research on employees’ ES use focuses on the positive effects of normative use behaviors(e.g.,explorative use or explorative-exploitative use)on employees and teams,and the negative effects of non-normative ES use behaviors(e.g.,system variation use).However,findings related to how employees’ system use behaviors are influenced by a combination of team and self-characteristics remain unclear.In addition,while prior studies have used the perspective of ambidexterity to explain the importance of ambidextrous integration of team elements for information technology(IT)development,few studies have combined the three dimensions of team management,team environment,and team technology with the perspective of ambidexterity to consider how different ambidextrous team elements affect employees’ ES usage behaviors.Combining the practical and theoretical backgrounds,this paper concludes that the combination of different team factors and individual characteristics under the perspective of ambidexterity on employees’ enterprise system use behavior can also be explored in depth in the following aspects:(1)discussing how to improve employees’normative ES use as well as avoid non-normative ES use in the relationship from explorative use to explorative-exploitative use,and then from normative ES use to nonnormative ES use;(2)based on the perspective of ambidexterity,we consider how different team factors influence employees’ different ES use behaviors from three dimensions:team management,team environment,and team technology;and(3)discuss how dual team factors combine with individual characteristics to influence employees’ different ES use behaviors.Study 1 explored how team ambidextrous leadership influenced employees’explorative use.Based on a sample of 218 employees in 56 teams at a state-owned jointstock bank,Study 1 found that:(1)team positively influences employees’ systemic exploratory use;(2)employees’ different self-efficacy mediates the cross-level relationship between ambidextrous leadership and explorative use;(3)employees’learning goal orientation positively moderates the cross-level relationship between ambidextrous leadership and their performance self-efficacy,which further influences employees’ explorative use.Study 2 explored how team contextual ambidexterity affects employees’explorative-exploitative use.Based on a sample of 244 employees from 59 teams in a state-owned joint-stock bank,Study 2 found that:(1)team contextual ambidexterity positively influenced employees’explorative-exploitative use;(2)user empowerment mediated the cross-level relationship between contextual ambidexterity and employees’explorative-exploitative use;(3)both leader-member exchange and team-member exchange positively moderated the relationship between contextual ambidexterity and user empowerment,which further influenced employees’ explorative-exploitative use.Study 3 explored how team ambidextrous support structure influenced employees’system workaround use.Based on a two-stage sample of 78 teams totaling 326 employees in a state-owned electric company,Study 3 found that(1)technology-driven challenge stressors and technology-driven hindrance stressors had different significant effects on employees’ workaround use;(2)team ambidextrous support structure negatively influenced employees’ workaround use and strengthened the negative relationship between technology-driven challenge stressors and employees’workaround use;and(3)trait resilience had different moderating effects on the relationship between different technology-driven stressors and employee workaround use behaviors.This study provides the following theoretical contributions to research related to employees’ ES use behaviors:(1)the logical relationships between employees’ system explorative use to explorative-exploitative use and normative system use to nonnormative system use are clarified,revealing the diversity of employees’ ES use behaviors;(2)the effects of different team-level factors on different employees’ ES use behaviors are explored from an ambidextrous perspective,validating the importance of the ambidextrous perspective in the process of employees’ ES use;and(3)a cross-level team-individual model was constructed to provide more diverse insights into the antecedents of employee ES use behaviors.This study also provides the following managerial insights:(1)organizations should provide reasonable ambidextrous teamlevel support for employees’ process of using ES;(2)employees should focus on improving their own psychological factors in the process of ES use;(3)managers should pay attention to the influence of interpersonal communication within the team on employees to improve the role of team elements in promoting employees’ normative ES use behavior;(4)employees should avoid non-normative ES use behaviors and improve their own system use efficiency from a long-term perspective.