Conform or Workaround? A Multilevel Analysis of the Effect of Group Cultural Tightness on Enterprise System Use

Enterprise Systems (ESs) embed industrial best practices into adopting organizations through the usage of their system features. Yet, employees often engage in workaround use, either internal or external to the ES, which does not conform to prescribed use, but nonetheless could be beneficial for accomplishing work tasks. Building on Cultural Tightness-Looseness theory and research on system workarounds, we develop a model examining how group cultural tightness—characterized by strong adherence to enforced norms within a group—shapes employees’ conforming and workaround use of ES and how these different forms of usage influence job performance. To test the hypotheses, we employ a mixed-method approach with Study 1 leveraging multilevel, longitudinal, and multisourced data collected from 228 employees within 57 groups in a Chinese company, along with Study 2 utilizing an online experiment involving 240 participants from the United States. Collectively, the studies provide compelling evidence supporting our research model, indicating that group cultural tightness plays an instrumental role in increasing conforming use while decreasing internal and external workaround use for individual employees across different national contexts. The findings of Study 1 further indicate that both conforming and internal workaround use have positive effects on employees’ job performance, whereas external workaround use negatively impacts their performance. An additional study, using a comparable research design and surveying 220 employees across 59 groups within a foreign multinational corporation operating in China, yields similar results, supporting the generalizability of these findings across different organizational settings. Findings from our study thus provide generalizable insights into the relative influence of group cultural tightness on conforming and internal and external workaround use of ES, as well as the distinct effects of these different modes of system usage on job performance.

History: Jason Thatcher, Senior Editor; Huigang Liang, Associate Editor.

Funding: This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 72522024, 72188101, 72271072, 72071190, 72342011, and 72332007] and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [Grants JZ2023HGPA0294 and JZ2024HGTG0314].

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2021.0417.