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

Jean-Charles Pillet and Kevin Daniel André Carillo

International Journal of Information Management, 2016, vol. 36, issue 1, 113-125

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.

Keywords: Social collaboration; No-email; Habit; Case study; Disruptive technology; Knowledge sharing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0268401215001024
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ininma:v:36:y:2016:i:1:p:113-125

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2015.11.001

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Information Management is currently edited by Yogesh K. Dwivedi

More articles in International Journal of Information Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().