Workplace literacy skills—how information and digital literacy affect adoption of digital technology
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-12-2021-0241 |
| Published date | 03 May 2022 |
| Date | 03 May 2022 |
| Pages | 371-391 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
| Author | Shahrokh Nikou,Mark De Reuver,Matin Mahboob Kanafi |
Workplace literacy skills—how
information and digital literacy
affect adoption of
digital technology
Shahrokh Nikou
Department of Information Studies,
Faculty of Social Sciences, Business, and Economics,
Abo Akademi,
Abo, Finland and
Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University,
Stockholm, Sweden
Mark De Reuver
Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, and
Matin Mahboob Kanafi
INERACT Unit, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland
Abstract
Purpose –Information and digital literacy have recently received much interest, and they are being viewed as
critical strategic organisational resources and skills that employees need to obtain in order to function at their
workplaces.Yet, the role of employees’lit eracyseems to be neglected in current literature. This pap era ims to explore
the roles that information and digitalliteracyplayontheemployees’perception in relation to usefulness and ease of
use of digital technologies and consequently their intention to use technology in the practices they perform at the
workplace.
Design/methodology/approach –This paper builds a conceptual model with key constructs (information
literacy and digital literacy) as new antecedents to the technology acceptance model and aims to establish that
information literacy and digital literacy are indirect determinants of employees’intention to use digital
technologies at the workplace. The data set used in this paper comprises of 121 respondents and structural
equation modelling was used.
Findings –The findings reveal that both information literacy and digital literacy have a direct impact on
perceived ease of use of technology but not on the perceive usefulness. The findings also show that both
literacies have an indirect impact on the intention to use digital technology at work via attitude towards use.
Practical implications –Managers and decision-makers should pay close attention to the literacy levels of
their staff. Because literacies are such an important skillset in the digital age, managers and chief information
officers may want to start by identifying which work groups or individuals require literacy training and
instruction, and then provide specific and relevant training or literacy interventions to help those who lack
sufficient literacy.
Originality/value –This is one of the first studies to consider information literacy and digital literacy as new
antecedents of the technology acceptance model at the workplace environment.
Keywords Digitalisation, Information literacy, Digital literacy, Technology, Workplace
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Digitalisation is radically transforming job design, job resources, professional and economic
activities all over the world, which warrant continuous exploration of how workplace
Information
and digital
literacy
371
© Shahrokh Nikou, Mark De Reuver and Matin Mahboob Kanafi. Published by Emerald Publishing
Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone
may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and
non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full
terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 18 December 2021
Revised 14 April 2022
Accepted 17 April 2022
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 78 No. 7, 2022
pp. 371-391
Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-12-2021-0241
digitalisation influences employees’engagement (Chan et al., 2021). Digitalisation is the
application of digital technologies and infrastructures in business, economy and society
(Autio, 2017). Unexpected incidents could also make the digitalisation process even more
complex and add new challenges to digital transformation journey (Iivari et al., 2020;K€
onig
et al., 2020). For example, recent global pandemic situation has added a fair amount of
complexity in, e.g. skills needed to execute remote work, activities and operations of the
organisations. This is especially a major challenge for organisations which are used to
traditional ways of performing their daily and routine activities. To cope with the challenges
imposed by the digitalisation, organisations need to develop digital strategies and strive to
identify the key success factors for their digital transformation journey (Hess et al., 2016;Vial,
2019). Organisations that are unable to meet the timely and harmonised adoption,
implementation and use of technological solutions will, inevitably, fail to flourish or in the
worst case to survive. In addition, the real challenge of digitalisation is not merely technology,
as introducing new technology into the workplace is not about hardware or software, it is
about workforce who need to adopt to change, know how to use technology and their post-
adoptive behaviours (Bala and Venkatesh, 2016;Colbert et al., 2016). In this regard, Farrell
et al. (2021) recently discovered that there is widespread agreement amongst policymakers
that the existing workforce’s literacies are inadequate to meet the literacy demands of the
future workplace.
Therefore, organisations not only must adopt strategies to deal with digitalisation but also
need to have a coherent strategy that includes a plan to reskill their workforces (Berger and
Frey, 2016;Kane et al., 2019). Moreover, in today’s complex information landscape, the
concept of literacy goes beyond being able to read and write that an individual either has or is
lacking (Bawden, 2001). Literacy is considered as a range of competences [1], knowledge, and
skills needed by people in different situations of their lives and through relationships with the
colleagues, the communities and the environments in which they interact (Panel, 2002). As
such, employers are looking more and more to hire new workforces with a high degree of
literacies such as information literacy (IL) and digital literacy (DL) (e.g. Mietzner and
Kamprath, 2013) and media literacy (Collard et al., 2017). Such literacies have been identified
as essential and generic skills as well as personal attributes in the digital age (Bowen and
Johnson, 2019;Farrell et al., 2021;Foster, 2019;Dede, 2010). Thus, it can be argued that to
deliver an efficient transformative digitalisation and to become a digital prepared workplace,
workplace literacies are necessary for all types of organisations, jobs titles, job design and
individuals to enhance and fulfil their task performance, or even be evaluated as a productive
employee.
We acknowledge that the terms literacies and skill-based literacies (Bawden, 2001;Stordy,
2015), are more suited to complex information settings, incorporating different types of
literacy (e.g. information, digital, media, library and computer). However, in this paper, we
will focus on IL and DL as they are primary and essential literacies, which have taken a centre
stage in debates of individuals’abilities to access, retrieve and critically analyse the
information that flows through digital technology in workplace context. In today’s
information-based digital era, knowing about information processing and technology
enhances not only individual performance, but also organisational performance. In addition,
we are aware that there are several definitions of IL and DL in the literature (e.g. Bawden,
2001;Lloyd, 2012;Stordy, 2015), and there are no agreed upon definitions for IL and DL. In
this paper, we use the American Library Association definitions of IL and DL, which has
produced often-quoted definitions.
IL is defined as a set of abilities to recognise when information is needed, to initiate search
strategies to locate, evaluate, assess, analyse and effectively use the needed information, and
to make decisions in formal and informal learning contexts, at work, at home and at the
educational settings (ACRL, 2017, p. 12; Serap Kurbanoglu et al., 2006). DL is defined as the
JD
78,7
372
To continue reading
Request your trial