Email-free collaboration: An exploratory study on the formation of new work habits among knowledge workers

The potential of social-collaboration technologies seriously questions email usage in organizations.This research investigates the role played by the notion of habit in influencing the relationship between perceived positive attributes about a social collaboration platform and employee knowledge sharing capability.A theoretical model is developed and tested through a quantitative case study methodology.Habit moderates the relationships between perceived attributes (relative advantage, perceived ease of use, and compatibility to a lesser extent) and knowledge sharing.When studying IT adoption/acceptance in the context of disruptive technologies, the link between perceptions, intention, and behavior is more complex than thought. Social collaboration technologies have rapidly spread across organizations, offering a unique opportunity to improve the exchange of knowledge among employees, especially in distributed work environments. The increasing popularity of social-collaboration tools as an employee-oriented communication channel, inevitably raises questions about the future of email as its intensive use by knowledge workers is more and more perceived as being inefficient and unproductive. Through a quantitative case study methodology, this study seeks to explore the role played by the notion of habit in explaining employee knowledge sharing capability for firms implementing social collaborative practices in the context of no-email initiatives. Data collected within a large international IT services company, which is among the first firms having made such shift, were used to test the developed conceptual model. The findings suggest that habit is positively influenced by relative advantage and perceived ease of use while relative advantage was found to positively impact knowledge sharing capability. Besides, habit moderates the relationships between three attributes (relative advantage, perceived ease of use, and compatibility to a lesser extent) and knowledge sharing capability. Theoretical and practical implications developed from these findings are then discussed.

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