The Alignment Of Organizational Incentives with Organizational Goals Across IT Adoption Stages

This paper presents a framework to plan organizational incentives for aligning usage behavior with organizational objectives across various IT adoption stages. Our framework is motivated by the introduction of incentive alignment as another dimension in Information Systems design (Ba et al., 2001) and is based on technology diffusion models presented in the literature. We focus in particular on the usage of technology that is discretionary in nature. In addition, the user group is limited to internal users of the technology at the operational level. The framework integrates key issues on motivation and incentives in order to understand how organizations can induce desired user behaviors congruent with the goals of the organization. We conclude with the use of an illustrative example to show how the framework can be used in an academic environment. This framework will help researchers and practitioners understand how to better manage and align the incentive structures for internal users across IT adoption stages.