The Relationship Between Organizational Factors And ERP Adoption

Data Collection

A semi-structured interview protocol was used to conduct the interviews. In the beginning of each interview, the participant was asked some preliminary questions like his or her educational, technical and professional background, experience and exposure with ERP, tenure with the current company and overall years of experience in the industry. After collecting this information, a series of exploratory questions was asked to understand the ERP adoption process among employees in general. The next set of questions asked for the respondents’ specific views regarding the factors the researcher is using for this research. Finally, they were asked open ended question to provide their specific observations and views on technology adoption in general and ERP adoption in specific by the employees’ and management’s role specific to this process.

The interview participant group consisted of eleven fulltime management level employees of four organizations which included Canadians and Americans; and government and non-government organizations that have implemented and used the ERP Application in their respective organizations and four ERP industry experts who participated in multiple ERP implementation projects across various industries in North America.

Data Analysis

The thematic and narrative analyses were used to analyse unstructured textual material from semi-structured interviews to develop concepts, categories, and themes. Thematic analysis is utilised to pinpoint and analyse the findings of the semi-structured interviews, in order to identify relevant rudiments that affect employees’ ERP adoption.

Organizational influence can motivate individual employees adopting a new technology (Beatty et al., 2001; Chang & Cheung, 2001; Cheung et al., 2000). All participants univocally agreed that organizational factors: training, management support, incentives and organizational culture play a vital role in the ERP adoption decision of the organizational employees.

Training and ERP Adoption

Employee training can contribute to the increase of their knowledge and expertise using the new system, which helps with the adoption to new technology (Al-Gahtani & King, 1999; Igbaria et al., 1997). In the research, a positive relationship between the training and individual’s adoption of new technology was identified (Igbaria et al., 1996; Jasperson et al., 2005). Every participant saw the benefit of proper and appropriate training as an important factor in the employees’ adoption decision. The following statements from various participants reflect the importance of training in adoption:

“I believe training is the key.”

“I think training helps.”

A few participants felt that training was important and quite needed but that the organizations’ method of training was faulty. Employees are given mechanical training for a system but lack the overall picture of the system and general understanding about the task they are supposed to accomplish. This makes them the perfect candidate for failure to achieve the desire outcome. The related deficiency in proper and effective training could be one of the reasons for the failure of a lot companies’ implementation of a new application. The following narrative explains the experience the manager went through in his own company where they implemented oracle E-Business suit as an ERP solution:

“If somebody doesn’t understand how their payroll works, how their vacation days work or rules of the company then it doesn’t matter which ERP system you put in front of them they will be confused because they don’t know what it tries to accomplish as they don’t understand it. This was one of the many downfalls in our company, the training we did here for oracle is exactly the reflection of that: where you sit-down and click through this piece of machinery and you click this and that slide after slide to some conclusion. But there is no grand understanding what the system was supposed to do for the business and how it will be helping the business and justification and explanation of the context”.

Participants reflected on how actual training is conducted. They felt more visual contents with appropriate examples would be a more effective method of training. The following statement represents this idea:

“If you want to train me and expect to learn then you have to go over some concrete examples of how I can achieve certain tasks. In particular, you need to talk more about system those are not intuitive, but you require less effort if the system is quite intuitive”.

Managerial Support and ERP Adoption

Researchers have established that managerial support is positively related to the individual’s adoption (Igbaria, 1993; Trevino & Webster, 1992). All participants accepted that managerial support is required for better adoption by employees. According to participants, managerial support includes providing appropriate resources, influencing them to use the system and getting used to and facilitating appropriate training. Some statements below are the reflection of these views:

“It is critical. Employees need managerial support for adoption, especially when the system is quite complicated like ERP.”

“Managerial supports are critical as managers are the first person employees are going to go for that (any) kind of support.”

Some participants felt that upper management has to possess the know-how first and diffuse that knowledge to the bottom layers and every one of the companies can execute the task uniformly using the new application. You cannot just give the new tool to the employees and expect them to figure it out and you expect good end results. They think expertise, support, commitment and motivation should flow down from top. If managers are not functionally and technically capable enough themselves, it is their duty to find and provide necessary resources and training to their subordinates. The following statement highlights this idea:

“I do not necessarily believe in the idea that we give you a new tool and go and figure it out by yourself and don’t worry about that. Even though sometimes you do that like when you hire someone to perform something specific, you say go and do it and I will look into the end products and you can use any tools you want. But that doesn’t apply when you talk about day to day tools used by general employees of the organization”.

Incentives and ERP Adoption

Incentive refers to the individual’s belief about the benefits or consequences of adopting a new technology (Chang & Cheung, 2001; Cheung et al., 2000). Appropriate incentive is often considered a prevailing motivator of employee behaviour in adopting a new technology (Nilakant & Rao, 1994; Sappington, 1991). All participants’ management and industry experts stressed the importance of incentives to individual adoption. The following statements highlight this importance:

“There has to be incentives”

“There might a need for incentives for achieving the goal”

“That (Incentive) is the key for making sure the proper adoption”

The majority of the attendees highlighted the need for non-monetary incentives compared to monetary incentives. They mentioned that if the new technology or application is being used to complete the existing task and employees are hired and paid for, then financial incentives over and beyond the salary are not required or given. Only when employees are asked and required to do something over and above their routine activities, monetary incentives might be provided and could be encouraging towards positive adoption. Without completely eliminating the need for financial incentives, they identified a few small prizes and drawings that were taking place in the organization especially when they were in the early phases to encourage more early adopters to the new application. The following statements elaborate on these thoughts:

“Usually you can’t say people I will give you this much and do it right, because they are already paid as they are the employee of the company”.

“Let’s talk about something that is little difficult and require me to do some extra work like ERP, expects an obvious extra payment as an individual”.

“I am not sure whether incentives apply to this specific example. If you are using an ERP solution and it is doing specific things and employees are supposed to use it because they were hired to do that and must do that. I don’t think you need any additional incentives to do that. Actually keeping the job itself will work as incentives in this case”.

Organizational Culture and ERP Adoption

The way each company defined its performance gap, developed its new technologies, educated and prepared the workforce were all influenced by prevailing beliefs and practices within the company culture about how to manage change. Research has concluded that corporate culture is predictive of technology adoption (Kitchell, 1995). All interviewers stressed the relevance of organizational culture in building the appropriate culture to assist and ease the adoption process of the employees. The following statements support this assertion:

“I think culture does play an important role”.

“Obviously organizational culture is important”.

“Cultures always play a role. Sometimes it is simpler and sometimes could be problematic. I think there is an element of organizational culture in the employees’ adoption process”.

Organizations that are highly structured and have disciplined workforces possibly enjoy stable organizational culture and make the adoption process easier. Unstructured, less disciplined and less creative workforce culture might present some challenges in terms of new technology adoption by employees. The following narrative from one of the experienced managers presents an excellent summary of this point:

“The large enterprise organizations that have an institutional sort of background will expect to follow all the rules all the times, and then it becomes easier to enforce something like this. Contrary in the smaller organizations where people are rogue and doing all sorts of wrong things, and tolerated (Even not encouraged), then it will be difficult to bring everyone on the same page. On the other hand, in the small organizations with rogue sometimes they are more creative and innovative. It means when you have a highly disciplined workforce and that’s your culture then no worries. Compared to when you have a less disciplined and more creative workforce then face challenges”.

Open door culture compared to closed door culture; collaborative compared to thwarting; supportive compared to unsupportive; information sharing compared to working in silo are all identified as positive stimuli towards favourable adoption by employees. Some of the statements will illustrate this point:

“If your managers are involved and supportive then employees will be involved”.

“Culture is also good when people are cross sharing the information, some organization no one tells you how to do anything as they are protective about their information”.

Youth-dominated versus old-dominated and conservative versus innovative corporate culture also play a vital role in the direction of the affirmative adoption by employees.

“But the organizations with high age average employees might think we were used to with the current system for that long and comfortable and this is just an extra work for us. How people are willing to adopt a change is based on age factor like younger one is easier to adopt changes than older folks. Like the person who worked as a Data Modeller for last forty years and think I am doing it for last 40 years and you are telling me to change now, he was not willing to make any changes. Also, I had a friend who used to work for a company, used to work with a technology for long time and all of sudden company decided to use another technology from another vendor, he never wanted to use the new product and never even wanted to hear about it for about training”.