The Influences of Employees and Managers on Interorganizational Systems: A Resources-Based Perspective

Previous research has emphasized the importance of employees, managers and human efforts in general in attaining operational and strategic benefits from the use of IT. This paper focuses on how human efforts influence operational and strategic benefits attained from the use of the interorganizational systems (IOSs). A conceptual model is constructed combining transaction-cost economics, resource-based view, operational benefits and strategic benefits. The empirical data is acquired through a mixed-method approach by combining two qualitative case studies and a quantitative field study. The findings indicate that human efforts positively influence two distinctive IOS capabilities: cross-organizational business processes and cross-organizational transfer of information and knowledge. The data also show to some extent support for the hypotheses that crossorganizational business processes positively influence the attainment of operational benefit and crossorganizational knowledge transfer positively influence the attainment of strategic benefits.