The Impact of Endogenous Motivations on Adoption of IT-Enabled Services

Abstract

Transformative services represent a crucial topic in future service research. Particularly in the energy sector, consumer adoption of transformative-often IT-enabled-services is essential to increased environmental sustainability. As adopting these services increases both individual and collective well-being, research has to delve more deeply into the origins of consumers' motivations. For this reason, this study aims at augmenting the understanding of how different types of motivation determine consumers' intention to adopt transformative services. The proposed model integrates the theory of planned behavior and the self-determination theory and is tested with survey data gathered from 462 users and 537 nonusers of home energy management services. Results indicate that consumers' motivations are major direct determinants of intentions to adopt. While this finding notably holds when consumers perceive the adoption as self-determined and internalize associated values such as environmentalism, motivations based on external rewards and feelings of compulsion matter to a lesser extent. A comparison of users and nonusers reveals important differences in motivation, in particular that extrinsic motivations tend to be more relevant for nonusers than for users.Keywords IT-enabled services, consumer motivation, information technology, transformative services, service adoption Recent service research has underlined the major strategic importance of sustainability and technology infusion for service innovations (Kunz and Hogreve 2011;Ostrom et al. 2010), making the development of transformative services one of the current top research priorities. In investigating transformative service, which is a ''service that centers on creating uplifting changes and improvements in the well-being of both individuals and communities'' (Ostrom et al. 2010, p. 12), researchers highlighted that these services should be particularly effective for improving the sustainability of production and consumption.Research on information systems (IS) has also emphasized that information technology (IT) is a ''change actant in sustainability innovation '' (Bengtsson and Å gerfalk 2011, p. 96), and that ''Green-IS'' in particular presents a major future challenge for the IT sector. Research analyzing how IS can help reduce energy consumption to support environmental sustainability is of particular interest (Watson, Boudreau, and Chen 2010). In this respect, ''emerging information and communication technology services can have a major impact on future energy and resource consumption through a range of services, including remote working, energy and waste management systems, improved logistics, and so on '' (Ostrom et al. 2010, p. 12).Thus, technology and service infusion as well as transformative services are particularly important in the energy sector.Ongoing liberalization of energy markets, scarcity of and dependence on fossil resources, and environmental concerns have been triggering substantial changes throughout the industry. More specifica...

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