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

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2015.11.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • 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.

Abstract

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.

Introduction

In recent years, a new light has been shed upon the concept of collaboration as business organizations have started to harness concepts from the web 2.0 to enhance their workers' interpersonal communication and collaboration capabilities (Kane, Alavi, Labianca, & Borgatti, 2014). This phenomenon hinges on the development of a new class of technology, enterprise social-collaborative technology, which supports the creation and exchange of user-generated content through the use of blogs, wikis, social networking features, social tagging, and microblogging (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010; Ngai, Tao, & Moon, 2015). Over a surprisingly brief period of time, the use of social collaborative tools has grown from limited experimentation to mainstream practices. According to the global consultancy McKinsey & Company, 83% of companies report the use of social-collaboration technologies in their organization (Bughin & Chui, 2013). Market analysts estimate the worldwide enterprise social networks and collaborative technologies market to grow from 1.0 billion in 2012 to 2.7 billion dollars by 2017 (IDC, 2013). Aside from a technological breakthrough, this represents a shift in the way people feel, think, and behave (e.g., Castells, 2013), with implications that are not yet well understood by communication and information systems researchers. This study aims at raising the awareness of researchers and practitioners about the broader nature of the social-collaboration phenomenon as it embodies a work behavior paradigm shift rather than being a mere question of IS/IT adoption.

Furthermore, faced with an urgent need to enhance internal collaboration and realizing the potential offered by social-collaboration technologies, some companies have started seriously questioning the usage of internal email as their main communication tool for employees (Johri, 2011). Indeed, knowledge workers receive massive amounts of emails everyday which results in an information overload that tends to decrease their individual performance (Evaristo, Adams, & Curley, 2015). Whereas email is a targeted communication channel that spreads out information in multiple inboxes, social-collaboration technologies offer topic-specific collaboration spaces in which information aggregates through the input of its users. Subsequently, knowledge exchange is expected to be particularly enhanced in distributed work environments (Beck, Pahlke, & Seebach, 2014). However, while email is not calibrated for efficiently circulating knowledge throughout the organization, its usage is deeply entrenched in today's organizational practices. In order for new forms of collaboration to take place, new working habits have to form and develop. Benefiting from the momentum offered by a company-wide email-free initiative, this study seeks to explore the key role played by the notion of habit in explaining knowledge sharing behaviors in firms implementing social collaborative practices in the context of no-email initiatives. This research builds on the work of Limayem and Hirt (2003); Limayem, Hirt, & Cheung, 2007) about the importance of habits in the adoption of new technologies. No-email initiatives being still at a nascent adoption stage, it appeared pertinent to narrow down our investigation to a single case to allow an in-depth examination and understanding of the role of habit in explaining how individuals collaborate without emails. Besides, the purposeful selection of a case that is highly theoretically relevant is a means to ensure the clear delineation of the context (and thus theoretical boundaries) within which the developed theoretical model may apply (Yin, 2003).

In the next section the theoretical background is provided. This is followed by the presentation of the developed theoretical model as well as the associated hypotheses. Then, research methodology, data analysis and results are presented. The papers wraps-up with the main contributions, limitations, and recommendations for future research.

Section snippets

Theoretical background

Collaboration occurs when two or more individuals who work together, support each other by sharing their ideas, knowledge or competencies with the purpose of accomplishing a given task (Hargrove, 1998). Such activity is supported by electronic technologies that help people coordinate their work with others by sharing information or knowledge (Doll & Deng, 2001). The proliferation of collaborative technologies is highly correlated to the development of globally distributed teams, a phenomenon

Model development

Fig. 1 depicts the research model. It is based on the assumption that habit moderates the relationships between perceived attributes towards a social collaborative platform (relative advantage, perceived ease of use, and compatibility); and employee knowledge sharing capability. The direct effect of the positive attributes on knowledge sharing is also hypothesized. The purposeful choice for using well-established theoretical foundations (the Diffusion of Innovation Theory from Rogers, 1983) was

Quantitative case study

The case study methodology is particularly useful to observe, explain, and/or explore a phenomenon within its real-life setting (Yin, 2003). No-email initiatives being still at a nascent adoption stage and only in pioneer organizations, it appeared pertinent to narrow down our investigation to a single case to allow an in-depth examination of the role of habit in explaining how individuals collaborate without emails. Besides, the purposeful selection of a case that is highly theoretically

Results

Once the measurement model evaluated, the next step involved analyzing the structural portion of the research model (Hulland, 1999; Vinzi,, Trinchera, & Amato, 2010). This section first describes the various tests that were conducted to assess the overall quality of the model followed by a more detailed analysis of the model's paths as well as an assessment of the hypothesized moderation effects.

Discussion

This section presents a discussion of the main findings alongside with the limitations of the study and contributions to theory and practice.

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