earticle

영어

Information technology is an effective means for raising firm competitiveness. In fact, what to purchase or how to purchase it must fall under a highly complex decision-making in which many different stakeholders are involved. These stakeholders are often known to take a defensive behavior. That is, instead of working toward a common goal of organizational performance, each individual of these stakeholders tends to act defensively to avoid risks he/she faces or minimize subsequent changes. Despite a frequent occurrence of defensive behavior in the process of IT purchasing, there has been no research about defensiveness in IT purchasing. Our study aims to elicit different types of defensive behavior in IT purchasing situations and to identify causes of these defensive behaviors. To this end, we surveyed IT professionals having much experience in IT purchasing and took a qualitative analysis on their opinions. We found out that there exist 9 different types of defensive behavior in IT purchasing and identified a set of factors causing the defensiveness and a set of their consequences.