Determining the Factors Influencing Enterprise Social Software Usage: Development of a Measurement Instrument for Empirical Assessment

With social software´s rapid advancement in the private realm, corporations aim to adopt its technologies and to transfer social software benefits, such as enhanced collaboration and knowledge sharing, to their organizations. However, enterprise social software platforms (ESSPs) often lack substantial attention. While some research into users´ motives to adopt social software in the private realm exists, the body of empirical studies on ESSP adoption is rather limited. Our research objective therefore is to contribute to closing this gap in research by determining the factors influencing employees´ ESSP usage. Building on previous research, we present an ESSP adoption model. We then propose an according measurement instrument for empirically assessing the factors influencing ESSP usage. A card sorting and item ranking approach is conducted in order to preliminarily validate the measurement instrument. We eventually suggest methods of classical test theory for the further validation of the measurement instrument and the assessment of the ESSP adoption model.