The main obstacle of using corporate Web 2.0 systems as management
tools is that these systems are usually not a result of the initiative of the employees of all the hierarchical levels existing in the organization, but an “upside‐down” initiative of the senior management. Due to this reason, the activity of employees in using such systems can be less than expected due to psychological factors inclining the employees to resist the senior management’s innovative initiatives.
Consequently, a necessity arises to develop instruments allowing achieving the
expected level of the employees' activity in accepting and using corporate Web
2.0 systems. To develop such instruments, it is important to figure out factors
influencing the employees’ activity in accepting and using the corporate Web 2.0
systems and to develop models allowing predicting the influence of these factors
on this employees' activity. One of the most promising models of such kind is the
Unified Theory for Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model that is
summarizing views on the factors influencing the employees’ activity in accepting
and using new technologies developed in a number of various management theories.
As for the moment, the UTAUT model is not being actively used in management
practice, as currently the model is on the stage of testing its validity. One of
the shortcomings of the empirical testing of the model’s validity by its authors is
that it is tested on the samples belonging to a single national culture, namely that
of the US. Most of the articles testing the validity of the UTAUT model in crosscultural settings are also working with constrained samples: either samples of single organizations from countries other than of the Anglo‐Saxon culture or the
samples of similar organizations (e.g., universities) from a number of different
countries. In this paper the validity of the UTAUT model is tested on a sample of
108 respondents facing the implementation of corporate Web 2.0 systems in
three Russian organizations belonging to different industries. By means of including employees of different organizations into one sample, the influence of industry or organization specificity on the dependencies included in the model is decreased to a certain extent, thus allowing a deeper analyze of the national specificity influences. The Principal Component Analysis results show five statistically significant factors that are logically interpretable within the UTAUT model logic. This proves the validity of the UTAUT model in relation to the sample under scrutiny. A number of conclusions are made in the paper about the specificity of factors influencing the acceptance and use of corporate Web 2.0 systems in the organizations included in the sample. On the basis of this specificity, recommendations are given about development of instruments of stimulating the activity of acceptance and use of these systems in Russian companies. Finally, further directions of research development are suggested in the paper.