User Resistance to the Implementation of Information Systems: A Psychological Contract Breach Perspective

The current study proposes an exploratory model to examine the antecedents of user resistance in information system (IS) implementations from the perspective of a psychological contract breach (PCB). The purpose of this study is to investigate PCBs between users and IS providers (ISPs), which extends IS theory in two ways: by elaborating on why some users psychologically resist the IS, and by more deeply exploring the social-psychological determinants of user resistance. Our results show that user-perceived PCBs can lead to user resistance and feelings of violation via reneging, high user vigilance, and incongruence between the users' and the ISP 's understandings of the obligations. Our results also show that users' interpretations-i.e., causal attribution of the breach and perceived fairness after the breach-moderate the relationship between user-perceived PCBs and feelings of violation. We discuss our findings and their academic and practical implications, and suggest directions for future research.