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The expansion of IT technologies has been influential on all areas of human life. Benefits from IT investment are only realized through sustained usage, rather than initial acceptance (Bhattacherjee, 2001b; Kim & Son, 2009). Users’ post-adoption behaviors have emerged as a key topic in recent IT researches (Bhattacherjee, 2001b; Bhattacherjee & Premkumar, 2004). Continuance intention describes the user’s decision to carry on using a specific IT that an individual has already been using. So, this subject is different from the user’s first-time usage of the IT. Understanding the reasons for users’ continuance in the use of an IT is critical for the long-term viability and the eventual success of the newly born means of IT (Bhattacherjee, 2001b). It turns out to be retaining existing users is considerably more cost-effective than attracting fresh users. This is especially true in services, wherein the continuous participation of users is vital for realization of desired goals. Therefore, designing strategies on continuously attracting user retention is one of the critical and general questions in IT global market (Zhang, Zhang, Ordóñez de Pablos, & Sun, 2014).
Over the last three decades, the amount of research works within the adoption umbrella has been vigorous (Hoehle, Scornavacca, & Huff, 2012; Song & Walden, 2007; Taufique & Shahriar, 2013). Although in the past a great deal of researches were devoted to understanding individuals’ acceptance of a new IT application, but recent literatures have been more dedicated to individuals’ behaviors at the post-adoption stages among both researchers and practitioners (Gerpott, 2011; Lee, 2010; Lin, 2012; Lu, 2014; Roca, Chiu, & Martínez, 2006; Tsai, Chien, & Tsai, 2014; Venkatesh, Thong, Chan, Hu, & Brown, 2011; Wu & Zhang, 2014; Yuan, Liu, Yao, & Liu, 2014; Zheng, Zhao, & Stylianou, 2013). Ortiz de Guinea and Markus (2009) describe post-adoption as “one of the most welcome developments in recent Information Systems (IS)”. However, our shared understanding of post-adoption use behaviors is still at its early stage of development (Jasperson, Carter, & Zmud, 2005).
A growing body of research has been developed to understand the continuance intention of IT which is an important research domain in the IS academia and we rarely come across a comprehensive article review on IT continuance intention. It is appropriate to review the existing body of knowledge in this area for two major causes; first, researchers may benefit from this study because we review researches across continuance intention of IT spanning over 13 years and we believe that this article is one of the first comprehensive articles in reviewing IT continuance intention literature systematically. This provides a comprehensive picture because users are influenced by various factors when using different IT services in post-adoption stage. We focus our attention to the methodologies used and theoretical frameworks employed to study IT continuance intention over the last decade. Second, practitioners could be benefitted by understanding key factors that determine the continuance intention of diverse range of technologies among customers, as retaining existing customers is a crucial feature of successful service providers.
According to Fink’s (2005) systematic literature review (SLR) represent: “a systematic, explicit, and reproducible method for identifying, evaluating, and synthesizing the existing body of completed and recorded work produced by researchers, scholars, and practitioners.” In a SLR the most important aspects of the accomplished researchers must be investigated, and useful information and statistics must be extracted (Jula, Sundararajan, & Othman, 2014). This paper, therefore, seeks to contribute to the understanding of IT continuance intention by undertaking a SLR of IT continuance intention.