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Relating Cognitive Problem-Solving Style to User Resistance 191
tion between user resistance and user complaint. The former study asserts that
amongst the various types of user resistance, there are: aggression; and the system
being blamed for all problems prevailing during implementation, including incorrect
data entries. This is confirmed in the latter study, where user resistance was
observed mainly to take the form of complaints, many of which Markus considered
unfair. These literary sources thus support a method that quantifies user dissatisfaction
as a substitute measure for user resistance.
However, there are types of resistance that cannot easily be proved to be
associated with complaint. Examples of such are psychological withdrawal and
absenteeism, because these are types of covert resistance whilst a complaint is a
case of overt resistance. The answer to the first question, then, is that the study must
be limited to investigating only those forms of resistance that are measurable in terms
of overt expressions of dissatisfaction. Whilst this may at first seem restrictive, it
should be noted that perceived success of the system to management is most likely
to be tied to reports of success from its employee users. In other words, this
measurement technique will appeal to managers whose interests are largely the
warding off of complaints against new systems from their staff.
The second issue is the question of how complete the list of the user’s
complaints would be, or alternatively, what the significance would be if the user
forgot to itemize certain problems. It is argued that this is not a significant issue, since
the R-score method aims to observe the user in the process of complaining. If, as
noted above, users tend to make unfair complaint as a resistance behavior, then
users will tend to invent or exaggerate complaints as an expression of their level of
dissatisfaction. Quite clearly, the issue of whether or not the user remembers all the
real problems that occurred during implementation then becomes less relevant.
The R-score approach does, however, prescribe certain stipulations that were
borne in mind during the research design. Firstly, the users needed to be interviewed
personally by a researcher to obtain their views of systems. This follows immediately
from the need to relieve the respondent of the obligation to complete and return
a form, as discussed above. Secondly, every effort had to be made to convince the
user that all his responses were to be kept confidential; particularly from the
analyst(s), management and potential business rivals. Without this stipulation, the
advantage of having opinions expressed to an independent researcher (as mentioned
above) would have been lost.
The weighting of the severity of the complaints is based on a model developed
by Wanous and Lawler (1972) for measuring a worker’s job satisfaction.
According to this model, an employee’s overall job satisfaction is the weighted sum
of his satisfaction with all significant facets of the job. This can be expressed
algebraically as:
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