An Empirical Investigation on End-Users' Acceptance of Enterprise Systems

Despite the huge investments by organizations in ERP implementation, maintenance, and user training, ERP implementation failures and less-than-satisfactory productivity improvements are common. End-users’ reluctance or unwillingness to adopt or use the newly implemented ERP system is often cited as one of the main reasons for ERP failures. To examine factors leading to the lack of end-user acceptance of ERP systems, we reviewed the literature on user adoption of IT in mandatory contexts, developed hypotheses to explain ERP user acceptance, and conducted a survey study to test the hypotheses. In particular, we examined end-users’ attitudes toward system use and symbolic adoption, which refers to users’ voluntary mental acceptance of a system, to understand user acceptance in the ERP context. Four cognitive constructs—perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived compatibility, and perceived fit—were hypothesized as the antecedents. The research model was tested through a survey of end-users’ perceptions concerning adopting and using a newly implemented ERP system. The findings support most of our hypotheses. Specifically, perceived compatibility and perceived ease of use have both direct and indirect effects (mediated by attitude) on symbolic adoption, while perceived fit and perceived usefulness influence symbolic adoption by being fully mediated through attitude. The study provides managerial implications for organizations that are striving to engender user acceptance of newly adopted enterprise systems and applications.