International Journal of Business, Management and Commerce (IJBMC)

The purpose of the current study is to explore under-subjective knowledge, a concept we develop here in the context of information technology innovations adoption and implementation research and to investigate its unique impact. In addition, this study examines the impact of compatibility on the relationship between under-subjective knowledge and IT innovations adoption and performance. To do so, we develop two versions of mobile systems for a controlled experiment: 1) high compatible system and 2) low compatible system. The experiments with 340 participants are designed to test four hypotheses. The results of the study show that the impact of under- subjective knowledge is negatively related to intention to adopt IT innovations while users in the condition demonstrated higher performance than those in over-subjective knowledge condition. The results also indicate that compatibility attenuate the negative impact of under-subjective knowledge on IT innovations adoption intention and improve IT implementation performance by triggering a transformation from under-subjective knowledge to a condition of objective knowledge (and possibly, and less ideally, to a condition of over-subjective knowledge).