Effect of trust and risk on user involvement

Low trust leads to Monitoring Involvement. The user watches the analyst's behavior and checks the analyst's work more closely. Based on the wording of the items used, existing involvement instruments are unable to distinguish between Partnership and Monitoring Involvement. But the concerns which motivate Monitoring Involvement are also possible explanations for subsequent project failure. To test this hypothesis, we interviewed experienced key users and systems analysts and developed a questionnaire for key users.The questionnaire asks about their level of trust in the analyst, the types of trust building activities which occurred, and their level of involvement. The involvement items were based on the Franz and Robey (1986) instrument. We sent the questionnaire to key users with project currently in progress, to avoid any retrospective bias, and received 104 responses. The questionnaire results show that involvement is also significantly higher among those managers who feel the project's success or failure will affect their careers. In summary, preliminary evidence suggests that involvement, as typically measured in the past, is sometimes a response to high risk and low trust in the analyst. This provides a possible explanation of why high involvement is not always associated with successful project outcomes.