Exploring the Influence of Cultural Values on the Acceptance of Information Technology: An Application of the Technology Acceptance Model

Introduction A fact of life for many companies, foreign and domestic, large and small, is how to be competitive in the global marketplace. This is especially so in the application of information technology to their operations on a global scale. The expanding interdependent global economy and the accompanying changes in the structure of competition are forcing many companies to seek new ways to manage their businesses. There is a growing need for coordination in the areas of product design, production, and distribution across country units in order to achieve global economies of scale and provide consistent quality service to global corporate customers. This growth of multinational business has been accompanied by significant increases in the adoption of new technologies around the world. Yet, the development of IT in a global environment is complex and significantly different from IT development within a domestic environment. Due to the differences existing in the political/legal, social/cultural, technological, and economic dimensions of the host country, as well as affiliate country=s environments, the implementation of global IT could pose major problems. Therefore, companies need to develop not just a generally favorable culture but also specific cultural characteristics to maximize the use of technology to the performance of their employees (Yip, 1995). The purpose of this paper is to explore IT adoption and its relationship with national culture. Specifically, it is argued that knowledge of the cultural orientation of organizational employees will greatly facilitate IT adoption and implementation, which in turn will con tribute to a successful company. Hunger and Wheelen (1995) point out that an optimal culture is one that best supports the mission and strategy of the company of which it is a part. Given the fact that 25 percent to 50 percent of an employee's behavior on the job is culturally determined (Gannon, 1994), one needs to understand the cultural values behind this employee. The critical challenge is to help employees relate better to global problems and opportunities (Garland & Farmer, 1986). Culture As early as 1952, researchers identified more than 160 definitions of culture, and in 1994, it was estimated that culture has been defined in approximately 400 ways (Ferraro, 1994). This paper will simply supply the reader with a brief introduction to the notion, rather than explore the many definitions. However, there is a common view in research concerning the basic meaning of culture: individually, we are all different, but share similar experiences with those who grew up in the same surroundings, in the same type of society as us. In this way, there are cultural differences between, for example: nations, regions, social classes, generations, organizations, etc. An operational definition of Culture, therefore, is: (1) something that is shared by all, or almost all members of some social group; (2) something that the older members of the group try to pass on to the younger members; and (3) something (as in the case of morals, laws and customs) that shapes behavior, or that structures one's perception of the world. Consequently, this is why a) culture is always a collective phenomenon (to be distinguished from the individual level), b) deep cultural values change relatively slowly over time, and c) collective cultural values influence the definition of laws, management styles, political institutions, the construction of theories and ways of carrying out research (Francesco & Gold, 1998). The key terms are the values and expectations that individuals bring into the work place. Therefore, increased knowledge about such factors as what motivates people from other cultures in how they will react under certain circumstances, in which way they make decisions and want shorter decisions to be made, the way they communicate, how they want contracts to be stipulated, how their performance is evaluated, etc. …