MEASUREMENT BIASES IN USER INVOLVEMENT RESEARCH

Considerable research has been conducted to demonstrate user involvement's effect on information system success. User involvement and system success typically have been measured by asking users for their perceptions of these variables. This paper reports on a field study conducted to investigate the possibility that this approach to measuring study variables tends to overstate the benefits of user involvement. The link of user involvement to user satisfaction is found to be significantly weaker when user involvement is assessed by systems analysts than when it is self reported. Further, this difference is found to be greater for systems with few users than for systems with many users. The findings suggest that common method variance and self-serving bias may have overstated the apparent benefits of user involvement in past research on information systems. Suggestions for future research are presented.