Improving IT assessment with IT artifact affordance perception priming

Article history: Received 3 November 2015 Received in revised form 21 November 2015 Accepted 21 November 2015 Available online xxxx Accurately assessing organizational information technology (IT) is important for accounting professionals, but also difficult. Both auditors and the professionals from whom they gather data are expected to make nuanced judgments regarding the adequacy and effectiveness of controls that protect key systems. IT artifacts (policies, procedures, and systems) are assessed in an audit because they “afford” relevant action possibilities but perception preferences shade the results of even systematic and well-tested assessment tools. This study of 246 business students makes two important contributions. First we demonstrate that a tendency to focus on either artifact or organizational imperative systematically reduces the power of well-regarded IT measurements. Second, we demonstrate that priming is an effective intervention strategy to increase the predictive power of constructs from the familiar technology acceptance model (TAM). © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.