Nothing endures but change: Understanding employees' responses to enterprise systems implementation and business process change

Implementation of an enterprise system (ES) often requires substantial changes to or reconfiguration of organizational business processes. Together, the new system and business processes may cause major changes in employees' work life. Employees typically resist an ES if they perceive that it will lead to major changes in their work life. While change management has been suggested as one of the critical success factors for ES implementation, there is limited research on understanding the nature, extent, and determinants of changes in specific facets of employees' work life due to an ES implementation and how employees respond to these changes. This dissertation, organized as three essays, addresses this gap by investigating the effects of ES implementation and associated process changes on two important aspects of employees' work life---i.e., job characteristics and interpersonal relationships---and how employees cope with an ES that causes these changes. Longitudinal field studies in two organizations implementing ESs support the idea that, following an ES implementation, employees will experience changes in their job characteristics and interpersonal relationships. Further, technology and work process characteristics predict these changes. The studies also confirm that employees engage in different adaptation behaviors to cope with an ES. ES implementation characteristics and employees' cognitive appraisals (e.g., whether the system is relevant to an employee's well-being) predict these behaviors. This dissertation makes important contributions by enriching our understanding of the impacts of ES implementations and associated business process changes on employees' work life. In terms of business practice, this work will help us develop effective interventions and change management strategies to maximize the success of ES implementations.