Determinants of IS continuance: the use of mobile computing services by field service staff in a South African mandatory setting

Abstract

Rugged mobile computing devices have enhanced durability and protection, thus allowing these devices to be used in the field as opposed to the office. These rugged mobile computing devices provide organisations with the ability to extend their information system services to their field staff, such as delivery persons, transport drivers and field technicians. Bhattacherjee's (2001) IS continuance model appears to fall short in explaining IS continuance in the context of field service staff who often perform repetitive tasks as part of their job as opposed to doing more complex tasks as performed by office bound knowledge workers. An IS continuance-based study in a South African organisation, where field service staff use rugged mobile devices, will improve our understanding of user behaviour towards technology within the body of IS knowledge. This study makes a contribution to theory by demonstrating that the core IS Continuance model by Bhattacherjee (2001), can be extended to include additional constructs to better predict IS continuance. This study proposes and tests an extension of Bhattacherjee’s (2001) IS continuance model, which explains the determinants of IS continuance intention in terms of affective and cognitive factors. The cognitive factors are task technology fit, perceived service availability, result demonstrability and the affective factor is the construct of familiarity. The study is carried out in a mandatory setting within the context of field technicians (working for a South African utility organisation) using application services on rugged mobile devices. To date, most IS continuance studies appear to have been carried out in a voluntary setting or an academic institution setting and very few of them have been conducted in organisations (mandatory settings). A structured questionnaire with closed questions was developed to capture field data from 144 participants on each of the study’s variables The hypotheses were tested using both parametric and non-parametric correlation and regression statistical analyses. The independent variables of perceived post-usage usefulness, familiarity and satisfaction explain approximately 51% of the variance in IS continuance intention. One of the key findings of the research is that perceived post usage usefulness loses its significance in the presence of Familiarity in predicting IS continuance intention. Thus, familiarity (affective factor) is the stronger predictor of IS continuance intention as opposed to the cognitive factors. In summary, this study showed that the affective factor is a stronger predictor of IS continuance intention than the cognitive factors, thus providing a richer understanding of IS continuance and a foundation for future research. Thus, in addition to methodological and contextual contributions, this study also contributes to theory.