Understanding the continued use of intra-organizational blogs: An adaptive habituation model

As intra-organizational blogs are expected to provide a flexible, intra-organizational networking platform that can effectively facilitate knowledge sharing, it is worthwhile to address why employees embrace a blogging system and engage in continual blogging. Drawing upon the existing literature, this paper proposes a conceptual model that suggests the continued use of internal blogs by employees is strongly driven by the force of habituation, which is repeatedly adapted by the effects of network externalities and managerial incentives. To empirically test this “adaptive habituation model”, actual usage data are collected from the internal blogging platform of a large telecommunication company to measure all related constructs. Statistical results from regression analyses illustrate that the proposed model effectively explains why employees continue to use corporate internal blogging systems. Practically, our findings suggest that while managerial measures, such as a ranking mechanism, may help leverage the benefits of intra-organizational social networking applications, it may take some time for these effects to emerge.