A Theory of Organization-EHR Affordance Actualization
Authors: Strong, Diane; Volkoff, Olga; Johnson, Sharon; Pelletier, Lori; Tulu, Bengisu; Bar-On, Isa; Trudel, John; Garber, Lawrence
Journal: Journal of the Association for Information Systems (2014)
DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00353
While organizations implement information technology (IT) to effect change, current theories of IT-associated organizational change pay insufficient attention to the change goals, the role of IT in organizational change, and the multilevel nature of change processes. We take a fresh look at IT-associated organizational change using grounded theory methods. Our longitudinal study of an electronic health record (EHR) system implementation in a multi-site medical group found user behaviors that did not fit well with existing theories. Instead, we found that they fit better with the concept of affordances from ecological psychology. In developing our affordance-based theory of IT-associated organizational change from our field data, we discovered three gaps in the affordance literature; namely, the lack of theory for (1) the process of actualizing an affordance’s potential, (2) affordances in an organizational context, and (3) bundles of interrelated affordances. This paper extends the theory of affordances to handle these three gaps and, in doing so, develops a mid-range theory for EHR-associated organizational change in a healthcare organization. While the resulting theory is specif…