Role of national culture on user adoption of e-government in Malaysia / Hamidah Abdul Rahim

There had been a lot of previous studies that had been taken to look into the issues that may influence the e-government adoption from technological, political and social perspective in developed nations. However, there is little research that studies the national cultural elements that may induce the user adoption of e-government in emerging nations specifically. The low level of adoption of e-government around the world required even a small step in ensuring that the effectiveness of government initiative in enhancing the delivery of services to the citizen is not wasted. From the literature review, it found that the e-government research mostly concentrated on e-government adoption in developed nations only. As the result, there is just a little knowledge that had been identified about the effect of national cultural factors on e-government adoption in emerging nations particularly in Malaysia. Thus, the aim of this research is to examine national cultural dimension that may affect the user adoption of e-government in Malaysia. Based on the literature review that had been done, this research adapt and modify the model that integrates Hofstede's national cultural dimensions with technology acceptance model (TAM) which were used in this study to investigate the effect of national cultural dimensions to the e-government adoption in Malaysia. This study uses the questionnaire as the survey instrument to collect data from university students that are working. Furthermore, from five Hofstede's cultural dimensions, only power distance and individualism/collectivist found to have an effect on IT adoption. Based on the survey data gathered up from a sum of 152 Malaysian users, evidence demonstrates that power distance and individualism/collectivist had significant impacts on users' adoption of e-government. The results suggest that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and attitude is significant indicators of users' intention to utilize e-government.