Use of ‘Habit’ Is not a Habit in Understanding Individual Technology Adoption: A Review of UTAUT2 Based Empirical Studies

Abstract

The extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) is the most comprehensive theory in examining individual acceptance and use of technology as on date. 'Habit' was the most important theoretical addition into UTAUT2 to challenge the role of behavioural intention as a lone predictor of technology use. However, a systematic review of 650 UTAUT2 citations revealed that only 147 studies utilised UTATU2 constructs and even if they utilised they did so in combination with external theories by omitting some of its original constructs with rare inclusion of moderators. Thus, this study aimed to understand the appropriateness of 'habit' among UTAUT2 based empirical studies. In doing so, this study found only 23 studies (35%) that utilised 'habit' construct. Whereas the remaining 43 studies (65%) did not utilise 'habit'. Researchers studying early stages of technology adoption in mandatory user settings should refrain from using habit construct. On the other hand, the usage of habit construct is encouraged in research to examine established technologies driven by consumer intrinsic motivation. The study also provide brief direction for practitioners and future research.

The Association Between Willingness of Frontline Care Providers’ to Adaptively Use Telehealth Technology and Virtual Service Performance in Provider-to-Provider Communication: Quantitative Study

“…Given that providers [58] and patients [90] were the main user groups of interest in previous studies for predicting telehealth technologies’ success, this study contributes to the health care literature by examining the adaptive structuration theory of individual from a care provider’s perspective and identifying salient constructs (the exploitative use of IT) in a research model to develop a contextualized theory. Second, the result that habit plays a significant role in adaptive IT use calls for more attention in IS research on how users’ habits accumulate from different life domains to affect their postadoptive use of multiple technologies [91]. Previous postadoption studies have established that habit reflects the extent to which people tend to perform behaviors automatically because of past learning [69,92-95].…”

The battle of Brain vs. Heart: A literature review and meta-analysis of “hedonic motivation” use in UTAUT2

“…This study conducted a literature review and meta-analysis on 79 UTAUT2 empirical studies in the pursuit to understand and provide suitable conditions for hedonic motivation construct usage. The findings revealed 58% of UTAUT2 studies included hedonic motivation construct that is much higher in comparison to just 41% and 35% inclusion of two other UTAUT2 additional constructs price value and habit respectively in similar studies(see Tamilmani et al, 2018c;2018d). The findings on individuals' motivation to perform various activities revealed that the primary driver behind vast majority of individuals as much as 73% in non-hedonic motivation-based studies was extrinsic motivation.…”

“…However, previous research found the scarce use of UTAUT2 model on its entirety with a rare inclusion of moderators in the research model. Meta-analysis on UTAUT2 based empirical studies found that only 41% studies included price value and a meagre 35% studies included habit in their research often yielding inconsistent results (see Tamilmani et al, 2018c;2018d). Hedonic motivation is not an exception to this trend; while hedonic motivation was found to be a significant predicator of mobile TV (Wong et al, 2014) and Instagram (Järvinen et al, 2016), it was found to be a non-significant predictor of mobile payments (Oliveira et al, 2016;Slade et al, 2015a).…”

The Influence of Mobile Technology Adoption among Secondary School Teachers using the UTAUT2 Model

“…HT defined as the behavior that an individual plays in establishing a tendency to use technology voluntarily [11]. Consumers are more likely to use any technology devices if they exposed to the environment [24]. In the case of this study, the habit of using MT can stimulate the driving force in improving teaching performance.…”