Individual enterprise social network adoption

Empirical evidence indicates that Enterprise Social Networks facilitate intra-organizational knowledge sharing. While organizations continue to invest in Enterprise Social Networks, many implementation projects fail due to insufficient user adoption.

Against this background, we investigated factors that influence individuals' adoption of Enterprise Social Networks in a recent research project. We thoroughly reviewed the existing literature and crafted a comprehensive adoption model. Besides commonly known adoption factors, we introduced perceived network externalities and perceived social capital advantage to account for the specific context of Enterprise Social Networks. We tested our model using structural equation modeling and empirical survey data of 155 respondents.

Our results show that perceived network externalities are by far the strongest predictor for enterprise social network adoption, followed by perceived enjoyment and perceived social capital advantage. In contrast to other studies, we find perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use to be insignificant.

Please read more about our research in our paper "Individual Enterprise Social Network Adoption: The Influence of Perceived Network Externalities and Perceived Social Capital Advantage" which has been accepted for presentation at the 17th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI 2022) which will take place from February 21 to 23 in Nuremberg, Germany.