The Social Side of Shadow It and its Impacts: Investigating the Relationship with Social Influence and Social Presence

Abstract

The use of shadow IT within organizations may offer an interesting context to analyze individual behavior in the contemporary society. Considering that social factors profoundly influence user behavior, we aim to investigate the relationship of perceived social influence and perceived social presence on shadow IT usage and its impacts based on the assumption that social factors influence individuals towards the use of shadow IT. We performed a survey among employees from different companies. The results show that shadow IT usage has a strong positive relationship with the social factors investigated here, which positively impacts employee’s work performance. Our findings suggest that shadow IT is a collective solution used and socially recognized by workgroups. In addition, we found that shadow IT can lead to optimized communication and collaboration among employees, teams or departments.