Emotional Satisfaction and IS Continuance Behavior: Reshaping the Expectation-Confirmation Model

This research develops and tests an extended Expectation-Confirmation Model (ECM) framework to investigate IT continuance behavior for the workplace and personal use. After collecting empirical data from emerging technology users, the authors created a new model that considers the oft-slighted bilateral nature of user satisfaction, which is divisible into cognitive and emotional satisfaction elements. The proposed model substitutes perceived benefit for perceived usefulness, which figures prominently in previous ECM models and yet fails to capture non-utilitarian advantages of IT. Also, the new model captures emotional aberrations and demonstrates repercussions in the continuance dependent variable. Our findings indicate that perceived benefit exhibits a strong positive effect on both cognitive and emotional satisfaction, as well as on user continuance intention. Further, results suggest that cognitive and emotional satisfaction are vital drivers of continuance and are necessary for IT product success. Moreover, emotional satisfaction exerts a stronger influence on continuance than does cognitive satisfaction, which implies that managers should emphasize emotional advantages, together with work performance. The IT product team can derive practical information from measured emotional responses arising from either normal or non-normal user behaviors. Overall, this work fills a research void in the IS literature, contributes to understanding IT post-adoption behavior, and describes a new perspective in IT continuance research.