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Modern organizations strove to retain their competitive edge by adopting information system (IS), such as hardware, software, data in paper or electronic form, as it enables them to enhance their operation’s efficiency, increase productivity and service quality in order to secure their competitive positions and their survivability in competitive markets (Avgerou, 2001; Hammer & Champy, 1993; Lu et al., 2011). For example, Enterprise Resourcing Planning (ERP) systems have been introduced by many organizations with purpose to improve workflow and efficiency for the last two decades (Jacobson, Shepherd, D’Aquila, & Carter, 2007; Momoh, Roy & Shehab, 2010).
For decades, information technology acceptance and use is a critical issue that has received much attention from researchers and practitioners (Venkatesh, 2000). In practice, successful investment in IS can lead to enhanced productivity, while failed systems implementation can lead to undesirable consequences such as financial losses and dissatisfaction among employees (Venkatesh, 2000). Nevertheless, organizations often fail to utilize and explore the new IS’s functionalities to achieve business objectives and have not fulfilled their expected effectiveness after the new systems are committed to routine operation (Bhattacherjee & Premkumar, 2004; Kaplan & Norton, 2008). Consequently, from the perspective of organizational level, successful implementation of new IS has become an important management task. In other words, “organizations need to ensure the success of the new IS project in order to succeed in executing their strategy and in turning their vision into reality” (Serra & Kunc, 2015, p. 53).
In many cases, the reason for new IS implementation failure is a lack of change management (Momoh, Roy & Shehab, 2010; Ziemba & Obłak, 2015). Indeed, according to Carnall’s (1986) definition of organizational change, adopting new IS within an organization can be seen as one form of organizational change. However, very little effort has been devoted to understanding the determinants of new IS acceptance and usage from the perspective of organizational change. In addition, leadership is posited as one of the most important variables affecting the attitudinal dimension of organizational life (Jaskyte, 2003). Therefore, to make up for such deficiency, the present study attempts to examine the antecedents of employees’ attitude towards ERP system from the perspective of leadership and organizational change. More clearly, the present study hypothesizes that transformational leadership exerts it influences on employee’s affective commitment to organization which, in turn, enhances affective commitment to change and, ultimately, influences employees’ attitude towards ERP system.