Mandatory Digital Change as a Staged Organizational Informing Process: A Time-Lagged Study

This study examines how employees evaluate mandatory digital change when technology use is imposed rather than voluntarily adopted. We conceptualize mandatory digital change as a staged organizational informing process in which pre-implementation organizational conditions shape employees’ expectations and their subsequent evaluation of the technology and the broader organizational change. A time-lagged field study was conducted in a public-sector organization undergoing a mandatory migration from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. Supervisor support and organizational support for innovation were measured before implementation, whereas expectation disconfirmation, attitudes toward the software, and overall change evaluation were assessed after implementation. The final matched sample included 115 employees. Supervisor support positively predicted ease-of-use disconfirmation, whereas organizational support for innovation unexpectedly predicted it negatively. Ease-of-use disconfirmation strongly predicted usefulness disconfirmation and showed a marginal positive association with attitudes toward the software. In turn, more positive attitudes toward the software predicted a more favorable evaluation of the organizational change. The findings suggest that mandatory technology implementation should be understood as more than technical deployment: organizational signals, proximal support, and the alignment between expectations and actual implementation experiences contribute to acceptance beyond mere compliance.