Document Type

Article

Rights

This item is available under a Creative Commons License for non-commercial use only

Disciplines

Business and Management.

Publication Details

Industrial Marketing Management, forthcoming

Abstract

This paper develops and empirically tests a model that examines the role of Technology Readiness (TR) in the Business-to-Business (B2B) context. It examines how the antecedents of TR affect the construct, and how the construct affects evaluations of a complex credence based B2B service. The research investigates how the retailers’ TR impacts their evaluation of web solution service providers (WSSPs). It responds to previous research calls by extending the TR construct from the business-to-consumer (B2C) perspective that is traditional in the extant literature into the B2B domain. The key findings of a survey conducted with 133 firms in the retail industry are that TR is an important contributor to the eventual achievement of service quality and satisfaction. The key contributions of this study are; first it develops and validates a measure of TR in a B2B context; second it investigates the antecedents of TR in this domain, demonstrating the impact of past inexperience, industry trust and switching costs on firms’ level of technology readiness to adopt online operations; and third, it finds that service quality and satisfaction are outcomes of TR. The key management implication for WSSPs is the need to address the TR levels of existing and potential clients if they wish to deliver successful e-business solutions to them, and that their clients’ TR can be better managed by making the offerings more easily understood, building relational rapport, reducing risk perceptions and adopting a client centric perspective throughout the process.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21427/D7Q20D

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