Determinants of instant messenger (IM) adoption and its effect on team performance: Mediating role of knowledge creation and quality communication

Arun Kumar Tarofder; Ahasanul Haque; Nishad Nawaz; Ismail Raisal; Adiza Alhassan Musah; Aza Azlina M D Kassim

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0289168

Determinants of instant messenger (IM) adoption and its effect on team performance: Mediating role of knowledge creation and quality communication

PLoS One. 2023 Nov 8;18(11):e0289168. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0289168. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Arun Kumar Tarofder¹, Ahasanul Haque², Nishad Nawaz³, Ismail Raisal⁴, Adiza Alhassan Musah¹, Aza Azlina M D Kassim¹

Affiliations

¹ Graduate School of Management, Management and Science University, Shah Alam, Malaysia.
² Department of Business Administration, International Islamic University Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
³ Department of Business Management, College of Business Administration, Kingdom University, Riffa, Bahrain.
⁴ Department of Management Faculty of Management and Commerce South Eastern University of Sri Lanka, Oluvil, Sri Lanka.

Abstract

Computer-mediated communication has dramatically transformed the human communication landscape by enhancing speed, content and social presence. The world has been experiencing a sharp decline in using email and phone calls due to organizations' rapid adoption of instant messenger (IM) for their day-to-day communication with their stakeholders. Moreover, the world has been experiencing a sharp decline in using email and phone calls since the beginning of the IM era. Hence, the aim of this study is to comprehend the IM adoption process through the lens of three theories. A structured questionnaire was developed to collect data from the organizations and test hypotheses using consistent PLS-SEM (PLSc) in SMART PLS combined with bootstrapping. The results indicated that parallelism is the most dominating factor explaining IM adoption in organizations followed by transmission velocity, rehearsability and symbol set. The findings of this study also confirmed that team performance is not influenced by communication but by the quality of the communication and the level of knowledge within the group that can create using instant messenger. Indeed, this empirical study is one of the limited investigations that combine three theories to explain the IM adoption process and its effect on team performance. Moreover, this study contributes both theoretically and practically to comprehending the adoption process of IM. Lastly, this study reconfirmed the importance of Media Synchronicity Theory (MST) and Social Presence Theory (SPT) in predicting IM adoption; and the findings of this research extended the applications of the Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST) from the IM perspective, which is, indeed, rare. Finally, this study provides a great foundation for managers to understand the importance of IM in their day-to-day communication systems.

Copyright: © 2023 Tarofder et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Communication*
Humans
Surveys and Questionnaires
Telephone*

Grants and funding

The authors would like to thank the research council at Kingdom University, Bahrain for financial support for this publication and grant number is 2017-53, awarded to Dr. Nishad Nawaz, College of Business Administration, Kingdom University, Bahrain.