**7. Discussion and conclusion**

Role of affect has been measured in this study to investigate on its relationship between positive and negative affect with knowledge workers' behavioral intention to use knowledge-sharing tools. The results show that these two constructs have significant relationship on behavioral intention to use and this was also supported by Zhang and Li's findings in 2007. Zhang and Li [36] pointed out that negative affect is easier to measure and investigate compared to positive affect. It was believed that negative affect creates impacts on knowledge worker's performance and their intention to use a technology. However, this study outcome produces a new finding where the results show that negative affect has no impact on individuals' perceived usefulness on the knowledge-sharing tools, whereas the results for attitude toward knowledge-sharing tools usage aligned with past literature works [4, 6]. Negative affect has a strong impact on behavioral intention usage of KS tools in the ATA model. From the findings, we know that knowledge workers use knowledge-sharing tools to perform their daily task in work, and the results gather their affect states after interacting with the tools. From the study, we conclude that if individuals have a strong negative influence on their behavioral intention, they will show less interest in the use of knowledge-sharing tools. Therefore, negative affect has the strongest influence on perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of the tools. On the other hand, positive affect shows significant impact on perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and behavioral intention. This implies that positive affect plays a great role in behavioral intention to use a technology; therefore, constant improvement on the tools is needed to induce positive affect on the individuals in using the tools.

Positive and negative affects are a major determining factor in technology acceptance. Past review works in information systems show that the outcomes were inconclusive and inconstant. Operationalization of affect and its related terms has been ambiguous. Many terms have been used interchangeably in a number of research; however, this is a growing field and interest among many researchers [12, 28, 37, 39, 40, 41, 46–56]. From the past related works, it has shown empirical evidence on the role of affect and it was used to explain better in a behavioral study. The proposed ATA model has hypothesized positive affect and negative affect in influencing PEOU, PU, and BI to use knowledge-sharing tools. Past research works has shown that affect has no significant impact on the usefulness of the tools. However, in this study, we found that positive affect has significant influence on the usefulness and ease of use on knowledge-sharing tools and subsequently influence individuals' behavioral intention to use. These findings are a new contribution to the theoretical aspect of affect relating technology acceptance area of study.

Practitioners and business operators can then maximize these findings by knowing what to do to their tools in order to encourage more usage of the tools. Software designers can consider affect element as they design new tools for knowledge workers. Unpleasant and uncomfortable feelings at the first glance on the tools may induce negative affect on the individuals, hence, impact of affect must be considered while designing user interface of a technology. Technology that induces positive affect will increase the tools acceptance. This study brings new implications to the top management on the factors that impact the knowledge workers' intention to use KS tools in their works. This study suggests that organizations should focus on knowledge workers' affective aspects besides other factors before implementing any KS tools in their organizations. The affective aspects of knowledge workers induced by the tools are found to be significant in this research. Therefore, top management should pay attention while formulating their knowledge-sharing tools implementation strategies in their organizations.
