Blockchain Adoption Strategy from the Perspective of Organization, Technology and Environment Theory: A Hybrid SEM and ANN Approach

Abstract

Blockchain technology has revolutionized organizational and strategic processes and ways of doing business. Nonetheless, blockchain technology adoption strategy presents a persistent challenge to technology, organization and environment processes. The adoption of blockchain technology has attained the attention of scholars significantly. Though there is enormous research related to blockchain technology adoption; however, owing to the technological revolution and everyday inventions, there is always a need to continue research efforts to explore the opportunities, potential issues and factors that foster or hinder blockchain technology adoption. Our study is an effort in the same direction which is aimed to investigate the role of technology, organization and environment theory and innovation resistance theory in blockchain technology adoption strategy. This study targeted 42 oil supply companies in Iraq. Data were collected through 363 questionnaires distributed among the senior level employees including heads of departments and managers. The study used a hybrid artificial neural network (ANN) and partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) approach to reveal the linear and non-linear relationships among the study variables. The findings confirmed the influence of technology, organization and environment theory and innovation resistance theory factors on blockchain technology adoption strategy in addition to the fully mediating role of innovation resistance theory. ANN results indicated that innovation resistance theory is the greatest contributing variable to the blockchain technology adoption strategy, subsequently regulatory uncertainty, data quality, network enhancement and technology volatility. Assessment of earlier works uncovered the scarcity of study on the subject of technology, organization and environment theory and innovation resistance theory in adopting blockchain technology. The findings revealed some important factors of blockchain technology adoption which are of worth to the oil companies’ managers to address the issue of resistance to blockchain technology adoption for better performance.