A Moderated Mediation Study: Cohesion Linking Centrifugal and Centripetal Forces to ERP Implementation Performance

A successful implementation of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system has become a critical facilitator for efficient operations management in enterprises. Due to the ERP system implementations being managed via the group, project team cohesion is often involved in the process of ERP group implementation (Wang et al., 2006). In this study, the researcher attempted to evaluate the effects of team members’ centrifugal and centripetal forces (CCFs) in regard to ERP implementation performance and project team cohesion, which affects the CCFs and successful ERP implementation. The results were investigated from a survey of 305 respondents that was collected from the members of ERP groups in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Taiwan. In addition to the centripetal forces being significantly positively related to ERP implementation performance and centrifugal forces not being significantly related to ERP implementation performance, the researcher also found that cohesion moderated the relationships between the CCFs and ERP implementation performance. Moreover, high centrifugal forces through cohesion lead to more successful ERP implementation when there are high centripetal forces than do low centrifugal forces through cohesion. However, the low centrifugal forces through cohesion lead to more successful ERP implementation performance when there are low centripetal forces than do high centrifugal forces through cohesion. In this study, we suggested that enterprises should use cohesion effectively to improve ERP implementation performance.