Proceedings of 7th Annual American Business Research Conference
23 - 24 July 2015, Sheraton LaGuardia East Hotel, New York, USA, ISBN: 978-1-922069-79-5
Effect of Top Management Support on Information Systems
Implementation Success: Additional Issues
Mark Hwang
 Brief statement of Research question or objective or statement of problem: The objective is to determine
the true effect of top management support on systems success by controlling the effect of two confounding
variables.
 Period of study, methodology or model used: A meta-analysis will be conducted.
 A brief statement of findings: the true effect of top management support on systems success.
Implementation of information systems (IS) is usually resource intensive, but the results are often less than
satisfactory. The botched rollout of the Obamacare website exemplifies how an IS project can cause
tremendous havoc that leads to waste of valuable resources and damaged reputation of an organization
(Judicial Watch, 2014). Numerous studies have been devoted to finding factors that contribute to the
success of IS implementation (Sabherwal, Jeyaraj, and Chowa, 2006). Among the factors that have been
most extensively investigated, top management support has usually been found to play a critical role to the
project outcomes (Ifinedo, 2008). Some researchers even claim that top management support is the most
critical factor to systems implementation success (Young and Jordan, 2008).
However, not all empirical evidence supports the critical role of top management support. A meta-analysis
found that the effect of top management support is moderated by task interdependence (Sharma and
Yetton 2003). A more recent meta-analysis, however, found that top management support equally effective
in both high and low task interdependence groups (Hwang and Schmidt, 2011). Is the effect of top
management support universal as reported by Young and Jordan (2008) and Hwang and Schmidt (2011)
or situational as asserted by Sharma and Yetton (2003)? The current research seeks to shed light on the
debate by examining additional methodological factors that may have contributed to inconsistent findings
cited in the literature. Specifically, we seek to study the potential confounding effect of two variables:
common method variance and measurement of the systems success variable. The objective is to
determine the true effect of top management support on systems success after the effect of two
confounding variables is accounted for.
Management Track
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Dr. Mark Hwang, BIS Department, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, MI 48859, mark.hwang@cmich.edu, Phone:
989-7745900, Fax: 989-7743356