Abstract

Post-adoption use has gained considerable attention during the last ten years of IT acceptance research. As of today, various types of post-adoption use have been proposed, researched and linked to different outcomes. Missing from the literature is a precise consideration of the impact of different types of use on specific outcomes. Consequently, questions of transition between use types and the resulting consequences for outcomes remain unanswered. In order to address this need, we have performed an intensive, conceptual literature study and propose a continuum of use types and mechanisms that foster an understanding of how post-adoption use not only leads to short- and mid-term IT-enabled outcomes such as efficiency and effectiveness, but also to long-term, complex outcomes such as innovativeness. We model these mechanisms as movements that occur along the continuum of use types and operate through the experiential learning cycle of knowledge acquisition and transformation. This cycle takes the form of a broadening and deepening of feature sets—a group of features that an individual has associated together and assigned to one or more tasks or tasks groups. To illustrate our research model, we provide an example based on a company from the auditing industry. Our research contributes to theory by 1) developing a typology of use in post-adoption and 2) explaining how a user moves between different post-adoption use types and arrives at different IT-enabled outcomes. We show how the notions of feature set deepening and broadening can be used to explain the attainment of short-term outcomes such as efficiency and effectiveness, and, beyond that, also to explain long-term outcomes such as innovativeness. We demonstrate that the achievement of outcomes is not a linear function as a user moves along the continuum, but a complex, non-linear process.

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