A “Collaborative Me” Crossroad: Individual Beliefs and the Adoption of Corporate Blogs

Collaboration has become an essential process to improve business performance. Firms need to enhance innovation, and this is where 2.0 collaborative tools are expected to play a key role. Corporate weblogs are one of the main 2.0 tools that have raised more interest among managers, due to their ease of use and potential to bring together employees and partners who have to collaborate in order to achieve a common goal. However, individuals’ reactions to the use of such new systems may differ, which in turn might lead to rejection of corporate blogs. Thus, the objective of this exploratory research is to study the influence of individuals’ beliefs in the adoption of corporate weblogs; more specifically, the factors discussed in this research are self-efficacy, personal outcomes expectations and anxiety. In order to assess predictive ability for the exploratory research model, we have developed a theory grounded model, which has been validated with data from 70 employees from the Information Technology department of a large industrial Spain-based company. Findings from the results show that perceived usefulness is predicted by anxiety and personal outcomes expectations, perceived ease of use is predicted by blog anxiety, and behavioral intention to use corporate blogs is predicted by perceived usefulness.