Positive and negative affect on the adoption of knowledge sharing tools in enterprises

This paper is built upon prior research on enterprise knowledge sharing. Our objective is to explore the role of affect among knowledge workers on adoption of knowledge sharing tools (KST). We examine two different constructs: positive affect and negative affect and their relationships. These affective constructs will be added into TAM (Technology Adoption Model) developed by Davis. Positive affect like joy, happiness, contentment, interest and enthusiasm have been largely neglected in both basic and applied disciplines that deal with affect. A lot of researchers pay attention to study on negative affect; this is because positive affect poses more difficulties in information systems research. Hence a lot of models on affect that were developed neglected the role of positive affect in these studies. As more research works focus on different states of affect by Information Systems researchers, this provides us with strong basis to justify and rationalize the need to consider states of affect in our research works. This study uses survey to conduct an empirical investigation. Our instruments are designed based on the Technology Affect Scale developed by Perlusz [23]. The data collected will be analyzed to ensure internal consistency and reliability of variables is achieved. This research study was among the first to use Technology Acceptance model embedding the role of affect in the context of enterprise knowledge sharing using knowledge tools.

I. Introduction

The use of Knowledge Management System (KMS) to create and share knowledge among employees in companies has become the most important task attempting to retain both tacit and explicit knowledge to stay competitive globally in today's society. Plenty of research works reviewed found that knowledge management failure in most companies occurred when people, culture and cognitive issues are ignored [6], [21], [23], [24], [25], [6]. Most of social sciences research involves around explaining the process of adoption, the success and failures factors in system adoption, the prediction of which factors and people's choices and behavior in influencing the adoption level of a system in an organization. Most of these theories developed in social sciences research ignored the affective components; however recently there is a surge of studies have tried to bring different roles of affect into information systems research. Areas such as psychology, marketing, organizational behavior and information systems have shown much interest in this area. The reasons of studying role of affect as one of the subject in this research is to better understand how affect state such as feelings able to bring an impact to the use of technology and adoption level among knowledge workers in enterprises.