Shackled to the Status Quo: The Inhibiting Effects of Incumbent System Habit, Switching Costs, and Inertia on New System Acceptance

By Greta L. Polites, Elena Karahanna. MIS Q., 2012

871 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Given that adoption of a new system often implies fully or partly replacing an incumbent system, resistance is often manifested as failure of a user to switch from an incumbent technology to a newly introduced one. Thus, a potential source of resistance to adopting a new system lies in the use of an incumbent system. Using the status quo bias and habit literatures as theoretical lenses, the study explains how use of an incumbent system negatively impacts new system perceptions and usage intentions. We argue that habitual use of an incumbent system, rationalization due to perceived transition costs, and psychological commitment due to perceived sunk costs all encourage development of inertia. Inertia in turn fully mediates the impact of these incumbent system constructs on constructs related to acceptance of the new system via psychological commitment based on cognitive consistency and by increasing the importance of normative pressures. Specifically, we hypothesize that inertia leads to decreased perceptions of the ease of use and relative advantage of a newly introduced system and has a negative impact on intentions to use the new system, above and beyond its impact through perceptions. Finally, we hypothesize that inertia moderates the relationship between subjective norm and intention, such that normative pressures to use a new system become more important in the presence of inertia. Empirical results largely support the hypothesized relationships showing the inhibiting effect of incumbent-system habit, transition and sunk costs, and inertia on acceptance of a new system. Our study thus extends theoretical understanding of the role of incumbent system constructs such as habit and inertia in technology acceptance, and lays the foundations for further study of the interplay between perceptions and cognition with respect to the incumbent system and those with respect to a new system.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Information Systems and Management, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/16187ce4cc7163bb8a0b4937ad4346d79a26f949

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In Applied Psychology

In Information Systems and Management

In Management Science and Operations Research

Citations in the corpus

Explaining the link between technostress and technology addiction for social networking sites: A study of distraction as a coping behavior (2019, background): “In the IS literature, the habit of using a particular IS predisposes individuals to greater use of that IS in an automatic way, implies less effort in using it, and prevents switching to a new system (Limayem and Hirt 2003; Polites and Karahanna 2012).”
Investigating acceptance of telemedicine services through an extended technology acceptance model (TAM) (2020, background): “It is identified in the literature that perceived risk contributes to the expectations of destructive consequences, thus, imparting a negative effect on usage intention [35,67,68].”
Strategizing information systems-enabled organizational transformation: A transdisciplinary review and new directions (2012, background): “…2000; Hackbarth et al., 2003); Performance vs. Learning goal orientation (Yi and Hwang, 2003); Status quo bias (Kim and Kankanhalli, 2009); Polites and Karahanna, 2012) Socio-cognitive inertia Norms and values at the individual, group, organization, industry and society levels Agents are…”
Quitting the use of a habituated hedonic information system: a theoretical model and empirical examination of Facebook users (2015, background): “Similarly, hednic-IS use habit can weaken self-observation processes (Polites & Karahanna, 2012), that is, paying attention to the problematic behavior and its consequences, which are essential in self-regulatory attempts (Bandura, 1998), make the discontinuance act deem unattainable, and devalue…”
Online purchase determinants of loyalty: the mediating effect of satisfaction in tourism (2016, background): “To summarize, there is large evidence suggesting that inertia plays a very important role in consumer choice and satisfaction (Polites and Karahanna, 2012).”
Assessing the effects of consumers' product evaluations and trust on repurchase intention in e-commerce environments (2018, methodology): “Using this method construct allows us not only comparing the loadings of each item on its own factor and the method factor, but also calculating the amount of method bias present in the entire dataset (Podsakoff et al., 2003; Polites and Karahanna, 2012).”
The effects of technostress and switching stress on discontinued use of social networking services: a study of Facebook use (2015, positive): “The multidimensional stress creator constructs were conceptualized as superordinate constructs (reflective first-order and reflective second-order construct; Polites et al., 2012) and evaluated as suggested by Wright et al. (2012).”
User Migration in Online Social Networks: A Case Study on Reddit During a Period of Community Unrest (2016, background): “Polites and Karahanna (2012) survey users to investigate the interaction between habit, inertia, and switching costs in user switching intention between group collaboration systems.”