Electronic Journal of e-Government Volume 7 Issue 4 2009 (pp391 - 402)
Hypothesis 2: the higher the EOU of the e-Government service, the greater the perceived usefulness of the technological innovation.
3.3 Social influence We define social influence as the “degree to which an individual believed that others thought they should use electronic government services”. The original TAM has been criticised by several authors for disregarding the impact of ‘social influence’ on adoption and diffusion of technological innovations (Melone, 1990; Davis et al., 1989). Malhotra and Galletta (2005) investigated the effect of social influences and found that the latter plays a vital role in determining the acceptance and usage behaviour of new adopters of technological innovations. In the UTAUT model, social influences were recognised as being one of the four determinants of BI to use. Social influence may be divided into external and interpersonal. The first includes mass media reports, expert opinions, and other nonpersonal information, while the other includes word-of-mouth from friends, colleagues, and superiors. This study makes reference to ‘social influence’ as interpersonal influence. Social influences are related to a person’s attitude towards e-government services and are based on the concept of personal innovativeness. Personal innovativeness in using IT is a trait reflecting a willingness to try out any new technology (Agarwal and Prasad, 1998). Innovations create uncertainty about their expected consequences, and individuals who are uncomfortable with uncertainty will tend to interact with their social network before making a decision. Overall, using an innovation is seen as a form of public consumption; it can be significantly influenced by friends and colleagues (Hong and Tam, 2006). In this research we propose that socially-communicated perceptions and beliefs may influence usage behaviour of e-Government services. Based on the above the following hypothesis is proposed: Hypothesis 3: Social Influence has a positive effect on a person’s attitude towards e-Government innovations. Although EOU is dependent on technology and user skills, explicit opinions expressed by others will affect it. Recently, Hsu and Lu (2004) studied the impact of social norms and found that this construct explains a determining factor in user’s decision to accept a new technology. People’s attitudes, behaviour, and perceptions are affected by the information he or she receives from the social environment. Social influences may shape his or her confidence in or ability to use a technological system. Potential users of e-Government services may feel that adopting the services and technologies will not require much effort if others in their social environment say that the system is easy to use. Social influence encourages people to use a technology, though it has an indirect impact on their intention to adopt. Based on the above, this study posits that: Hypothesis 4: Social influence has a positive effect on EOU of the e-Government service.
3.4 Voluntariness Voluntariness is defined as “the degree to which the use of the innovation is perceived to be voluntary or of free will” (Rogers, 1983); and is an objective condition about the adoption opportunity. Voluntariness is closely related to EOU and reflects user’s perceptions of specific IT adoption settings, rather than a subjective consciousness. Many organisations have implemented non-mandatory information systems that escape the conventional logic of understanding acceptance and usage. In most organisation technologies are mandated; hence the basic relationships of conventional technology acceptance models will be different (Brown et al., 2002). Because voluntary systems require voluntary behaviour, researchers have traced recent implementation failure to lack of user commitment. Malhotra and Galetta (2005) found that user commitment plays a critical role in the volitional acceptance and usage of information systems. In the case of e-Government, most eServices implemented will be done on a mandatory basis and hence, it is justified to study the user perceptions of voluntariness on the e-Government service implemented. Thus the following hypothesis is proposed: Hypothesis 5: The perceptions of voluntariness of using e-Government services will have a positive effect on BI.
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