The Applicability of TAM Outside North America: An Empirical Test in the United Kingdom

Recently, researchers in IS have begun to rely on the theories of innovation diffusion to study implementation problems. A major focus of these studies has been how potential users’ perceptions of the information technology (IT) innovation influence its adoption. User acceptance of IT has been a primary focus in the MIS implementation research for the past decade. Why do users accept or reject information systems? How is user acceptance affected by perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and attitude toward acceptance behavior? The present research addresses these questions in the Western Europe culture. The primary objective of this study is to investigate the applicability of the technology acceptance model in the United Kingdom. This study seeks empirical support for the well-known technology acceptance model, or TAM in the UK. TAM is used as a base model to produce a causal model resembling a network of relationships among the constructs of the study. A field study of 324 users regarding an IT system was conducted in the UK to validate measures used to operationalize model variables and to test the hypothesized network of relationships. Partial Least Squares (PLS), a second-generation multivariate analysis technique, was used to estimate the parameters of the proposed causal model. The study findings indicate that TAM is very applicable to the UK, which lend a hand to a good tool of assessing IT acceptance in this developed region of the world. They also indicate that perceived usefulness has the largest influence on IT acceptance followed by users’ attitudes toward IT. Perceived usefulness demonstrate to operate directly on IT acceptance and indirectly through attitudes. Meanwhile, perceived ease of use has a larger influence on users’ attitudes than does perceived usefulness. Suggestions for future research and implications of findings are discussed.