خوداثربخشی اینترنت و پذیرش خدمات الکترونیکی

Internet self-efficacy (ISE), or the beliefs in one's capabilities to organize and execute courses of Internet actions required to produce given attainments, is a potentially important factor to explain the consumers' decisions in e-commerce use, such as e-service. In this study, we introduce two types of ISE (i.e., general Internet self-efficacy and Web-specific self-efficacy) as new factors that reflect the user's behavioral control beliefs in e-service acceptance. Using these two constructs as behavioral control factors, we extend and empirically validate the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) for the World Wide Web (WWW) context.

World Wide Web (WWW) has been the fast growing area of Internet technology in recent years. The explosive growth of WWW has made it a popular platform for electronic services (e-service). Most organizations are migrating to e-services and provide incentives of that over the offline services. Although positive outcomes, such as reducing product search and transaction cost, were the basis for the theories of electronic market [43] and separated online shopper from offline shopper, prior researchers [32] and [22] found that the desire to use e-service is not sufficient to carry it out. One must also have the perceived ability to complete it. These include establishing and maintaining a stable Internet connection, learning how to navigate on the WWW, and searching it for relevant information. Internet self-efficacy (ISE), or the belief in one's capabilities to organize and execute courses of Internet actions required to produce given attainments, is a potentially important factor in efforts to use the e-services. This is perhaps not an important issue in offline service environments, where consumers learn how to make purchase at an early stage. However, complexity, knowledge barriers to initial e-service adoption, and comfort and satisfaction issues faced by new users may be construed as Internet self-efficacy deficits [23]. Understanding the acceptance pattern and the role of Internet self-efficacy in e-service adoption constitutes an important research issue. Recently, Ajzen [3] further extends the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) [1] and [2] by including self-efficacy as a behavioral control variable to deal with situations in which people may lack complete capability to exercise control over the behavior of interest. For researching e-service adoption, this addition is significant because it relates the causal link between Internet self-efficacy and e-service adoption. The theory of planned behavior is well tested in a variety of decision-making area such as marketing-consumer behavior [11], leisure behavior [4], and information technology (IT) ethics [13]. TPB has also been applied to explain an individual's adoption and usage of a new technology (e.g., [12], [35], [44] and [48]). As the TPB [1] and [2] was conceived to explain and predict the individual's acceptance of IT, its extended model is very well suited to further our understanding of e-service acceptance due to its strong theoretical anchors and its inclusion of self-efficacy. The goal of the present research is to apply the extended TPB model to the study of e-service (filing income tax through the WWW) acceptance. The contribution of the present study is threefold. First, this study identifies factors that determine users' acceptance of e-service. Second, we examine the nature of ISE and then divide it into two constructs: general ISE (GISE) and Web-specific self-efficacy (WSE). Finally, we examine the causal relationships between the ISE constructs and TPB constructs by using data from a field survey of e-service use.

The goal of the present study was to empirically extend current understanding about the concept of self-efficacy in the context of e-service. In particular, we provided an empirical test of the differential effects of two alternative forms of self-efficacy: general Internet self-efficacy (GISE) and Web-specific self-efficacy (WSE). Overall, this study provides support for the conceptual research model and 10 of the 14 hypotheses as depicted in Fig. 1. The results of this study provide support for the Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) perspective on e-service behavior on the WWW. GISE and WSE were found to play important roles in shaping individual behavior. Consistent with prior studies arguing that self-efficacy is an important determinant of behavioral intentions, our study found that the relationship between WSE and behavioral intention was significant. The result indicated that GISE had a significant influence on attitude toward the e-service usage. Consistent with the study examining the relationship between general computer self-efficacy and task-specific computer self-efficacy [33], the present study confirmed that GISE contributed to the shape of an individual's WSE. The result also showed that WSE had a significant direct effect on e-service usage, whereas GISE had an indirect effect on e-service usage through WSE, attitude, and intention. The path from perceived controllability to behavioral intention and e-service usage were not significant. A plausible explanation is that the government allowed individuals to choose filing tax through the e-file or brick-and-mortar service, and thus individuals had full volitional control over their behaviors. Under the condition of full volitional control, an individual's intention and behavior will not be directed by his/her perceived controllability. Additionally, consistent with the study examining the relationships among attitude, behavioral intention, and actual usage of a virtual store [15], the present study confirmed that attitude toward the e-service usage was the major determinant of behavioral intention, which in turn was the major determinant of e-service usage. Our findings are also consistent with Davis et al.'s [20] observation that people form intentions to perform behaviors toward which they have positive affect. The typical formulation in e-commerce decision confirms that people's e-service usage is influenced by their outcome evaluations (attitude), while these evaluations in turn influence their intentions. Inconsistent with our hypothesis, this study found that interpersonal norm and social norm did not have a significant direct effect on behavioral intention. It means that consumers' decisions in e-service usage are not influenced by important referents and mass media. A possible explanation is that that the implementation of the e-file service has past the early stage of the innovation diffusion process in which social influences have a significant effect on intention. According to innovation diffusion theory, an IT adoption creates uncertainty about its expected consequences for the potential adopters. Since the level of uncertainty declines as individuals move through the stages of the adoption process, the impact of interpersonal and social norms will therefore decline and diminish to nonsignificance over time. However, interpersonal and social norms had significant indirect effects on behavioral intention through attitude toward the e-service usage. It implies that attitudes are developed in social networks and are affected by social influences and consumers with more favorable attitude toward the e-service use are more likely to accept and use it. The present study confirmed that perceived usefulness and perceived playfulness contributed to the shape of an individual's positive attitude, whereas perceived risk had a negative effect on attitude. Perceived usefulness appeared to be a stronger predictor of attitude than perceived playfulness. In other words, the positive extrinsic (economic) motivation factor (e.g., usefulness) has more powerful effect than the positive intrinsic factor (e.g., playfulness) to build positive attitude. The findings of the present study have various implications for research as well as practice. First, this study provides an initial step toward the application of Internet self-efficacy (ISE) to the study of consumers' decisions in the e-service use. Our research confirms that Internet self-efficacy is a meaningful construct within the context of e-services on the Web. The results indicate that consumers with higher Internet self-efficacy are more likely to use e-services. It implies that increasing consumers' Internet self-efficacy is critical to the success of an e-service. Second, two types of ISE beliefs (general vs. specific) were simultaneously explored in a single context of e-service usage. In this study, both measures of ISE performed well within the model and had differential levels of effectiveness. This will further the development of a multi-level theory of efficacy and Internet/WWW usage. Third, this study implies that usefulness, playfulness, and risk beliefs will play important roles in affecting users' decision processes of e-services adoption. Many designers believe that key barrier to user acceptance is the lack of performance improvement and playfulness of current e-services. Yet our data indicates that although usefulness and playfulness of the e-service is clearly important, the risk of using the service is also important and should not be overlooked. Therefore, IS practitioners must reflect extrinsic (economic) motivation as well as intrinsic motivation issues in user interface and functionality design of e-services and try to improve consumer's subjective assessment of uncertainty and adverse consequences of transacting and using services on the Internet. Although the findings are encouraging and useful, the present study has certain limitations and needs further researches. First, the model explained 30% of the variance in e-service usage. The relatively low figure of the present study may partly be explained by its focus on Internet self-efficacy. This figure implies that our model might have missed some important factors that have direct or indirect effects on consumers' decisions in e-service usage. Therefore, there is a need for further investigation on other factors, such as trust, perceived compatibility, prior experience, system quality, information quality, service quality, etc. Second, whether our findings could be generalized to all e-services is unclear. Further research is necessary to verify the generalizability of our findings. Third, the data presented is cross-sectional, longitudinal data will be needed in the future to assess what factors will influence consumers' decisions in continuing to use the e-service and shifting to e-service instead of remaining to use the brick-and-mortar service. Fourth, SCT [9] explains human behavior in terms of triadic and reciprocal causation among behavioral, personal, and environmental factors. Individuals with beliefs in their efficacy set more positive outcome expectations for themselves and thus mount the level of motivation needed to reach higher levels of performance. This successful performance experience then enhances subsequent judgments of efficacy and increase outcome expectations. Future research should collect longitudinal data to test predictive validity and reciprocal causality that should exist between Internet self-efficacy and e-service usage. Finally, the usage of the e-file service is currently voluntary (under tax payers' full volitional control). The findings may not be generalized to the mandatory setting. Hartwick and Barki [26] theorized and found support to the notion that voluntary use of IT is under an individual's control and likely to be based on attitudinal considerations, whereas mandatory use is also under an individual's control but is likely to based on normative considerations. Thus, further research is necessary to verify the differences between the voluntary and mandatory settings.