Assessing Users’ Resistance Towards a New Information System: An Empirical Study Based on Status Quo Bias

Abstract

Upgrading IT infrastructure to enable additional business benefits is increasingly common and critical today, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the shift towards digitization, especially in medium and large enterprises. Change often entails challenges from the user perspective, which we call user resistance. In this paper, we therefore examine the drivers of user acceptance and resistance to the introduction of a new information system in order to recommend better ways of managing the implementation process. We do so by developing a model to test user resistance in a large enterprise with global setting for a large-scale CRM information system change by integrating the literature on technology acceptance and user resistance with the status quo bias perspective. The status quo bias theory can help understand the user decision-making process that results in acceptance or rejection of change. Our results show that switching costs, switching benefits, and organizational support play key roles in the user decision-making process. Switching costs have a positive effect on user resistance towards a new information system, switching benefits have a positive effect on perceived value and a negative effect on user resistance, while organizational support has an indirect effect on user resistance through its negative effect on switching costs.