Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-1-2015

Abstract

Corporate Information Technology (IT) functions are under increasing pressure to succeed in their IT outsourcing (ITO) arrangements. Studies of ITO success have in the past mainly explored its operational and financial aspects. At the same time there is a dearth of research on broader organizational antecedents and outcomes of ITO. This study examines the effect of organizational identity on outsourcing success. Specifically, we ask: does the strength of an organization’s identity- i.e. how unique it views its role in relation to other corporate functions- influence ITO success? We conduct an empirical study among 312 IT leaders engaged in outsourcing. We find that organizational identity strength mediates the effect of one pivotal outsourcing antecedent – effective knowledge sharing – on ITO Success. We thereby expose the role of identity strength as a potential determinant of ITO success and subsequently surmise that it is likely to have a material impact on the firm as a whole.

Keywords

outsourcing, organizational identity, trust, effective knowledge sharing

Rights

© The Author(s). This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Department/Center

Design & Innovation

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.