Use IT again? Dynamic roles of habit, intention and their interaction on continued system use by individuals in utilitarian, volitional contexts

ABSTRACT

This paper employs a longitudinal perspective to examine continued system use (CSU) by individuals in utilitarian, volitional contexts when alternative systems are present . We focus on two key behavioural antecedents of CSU – habit and continuance intention – and theorise how the relationships between CSU and these antecedents evolve over time. In addition, we hypothesise how the interaction effect of habit and intention on CSU evolves temporally. Our theorising differs from extant literature in two important respects: 1) In contrast to the widespread acceptance of the diminishing effect of continuance intention on CSU in the information systems (IS) literature, we hypothesise that in our context, its impact increases with time; and 2) In contrast to the negative moderation effect of habit on the relationship between intention and CSU proposed in the literature, we posit a positive interaction effect. We collect longitudinal survey data on the use of a higher education IS from students in a European university. Our results suggest that the impact of continuance intention on CSU as well as the interaction effect between habit and intention are increasing over time. We further introduce a methodological innovation – the permutation approach to conduct the multi-group analysis with repeated measures – to the literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Continued system use
• habit
• longitudinal research
• continuance intention
• volitional
• utilitarian

Disclosure statement

This analysis uses the SmartPLS 3 statistical software (https://www.smartpls.com/); Jan-Michael Becker acknowledges that he has a financial interest in SmartPLS.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/0960085X.2022.2115949

Notes

1. SAP has promised support for older versions until 2025, although it has deliberately kept the timeline and product map vague. Industry professionals expect organisations to be able to use older enterprise technologies in parallel with SAP S4/HANA beyond 2025.

2. It is important to note here that although constructs, such as habit, experience and past use appear to be the same, prior research has clearly distinguished them (Limayem et al., 2007; Venkatesh et al., 2012).

3. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

4. Based on a reviewer suggestion, we excluded responses that fail attention checks. Specifically, we exclude: 1) respondents who fail the majority of trap questions (i.e., questions that asked the respondents to click on a specific response category, and 2) “straightliner” who clicked more than 90% of the time on the same response category. However, the main findings are robust when not excluding these respondents.

5. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for recommending this approach.

6. The two constructs that have a higher HTMT than 0.9 are past and current system use, that is, the same constructs measured at different time points. In such a case, discriminant validity is not required as we are measuring the same construct.