Vincent Vermeulen
Current position:
Consultant at Microsoft the Netherlands
Thesis title:
Leveraging the Digital Work Style: “Identifying Uneven Patterns of Adoption among the IT-enabled Workforce
Description:
The current research study serves to provide a fuller understanding of the adoption of a new way of working enabled by information technology, the digital work style. Our results suggest that a better understanding of the factors influencing the adoption of a new way of working, guides managerial interventions, and, in turn, will lead to better implementation of a digital work style. Dealing with the strategic issues of corporate decision-makers, binary oppositions such as mobile- and deskbound workers do not do justice to the complexity of the contemporary work environment. Same is evidenced by empirical studies detailing the information technologies that workers use, while bringing together multiple measures of uneven patterns of adoption (e.g. TAM, Davis, 1989). As a case study, the present investigation reveals how measures of adoption can be problematic. Examining the social processes relating to information technology in more detail, one challenge, in particular, we have been grappling with is to ask ourselves how different patterns of interaction, communication and other work behaviour, relate to the adoption of new ways of working. After providing an overview of the various theoretical lenses, through which prior research has approached the problem of individual behaviour intention. The present research study proposes a conceptual framework that illuminates the relationships in an extended theory of planned behaviour model and describes operational measures for the constructs that possess desirable psychometric properties. The behavioural patterns of worker archetypes are hypothesized to exhibit an effect on the behavioural intention to adopt a digital work style, as well as the consequences of adopting a new way of working. The current research is unique in that it marries the traditional behaviour models with the application of personas, or worker profiles that encapsulate different work styles. In that manner, it is beneficial for managers, given that it demonstrates how an organization might develop insights for effective implementations of new ways of working, in order to fully reach the potential of its workers and discover their path to success.
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2007 - Vincent Vermeulen
