Identifying IT User Mindsets: Acceptance, Resistance and Ambivalence

Despite the progress that has been made in understanding acceptance and resistance, there remains a need to further investigate the nature of these core IS constructs. Our review and analysis of the literature on acceptance and resistance leads us to suggest that these are multidimensional constructs that are associated with a complex mix of behavioral manifestations. We argue that acceptance and resistance are mindsets comprising three dimensions: emotions, cognition, and attitudes, and that the related behaviors are manifestations of these individuals´ mindset. User behaviors are positioned along two dimensions. The first one represents the mindset of the user and the other represents the compliance of user behavior with the IT usage policies. We use our framework as a foundation for proposing a typology of IT user behaviors that comprises five archetypes - engaged, resigned, deviant, dissident, and ambivalent. For each archetype, we derive a theoretical proposition.