Consumer adoption of e-service: Integrating technology readiness with the theory of planned behavior

Abstract

Increases in labour costs and innovations in technology have contributed to the growth of Internet-based e-service. Customers use the new technologies to produce and consume services without direct personal contact with companies. The trends of e-service technologies will continue as e-service are increasingly implemented in customer-firm interactions. This study devoted effort for developing an integrated model designed to predict and explain an individual’s continuous use of e-service based on the concepts of Technology Readiness (TR) and Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). The participants were from undergraduate student, selected 405 responses as the sample finally. We applied Structural Equation Model (SEM) to demonstrate the stability of the proposed model and the results of hypotheses testing. Overall, the research findings showed that the effect of attitude and perceived behavioral control are very important but that subjective norm does not influence an individual’s continued usage intention of e-service. Besides, technology readiness has significantly influence on attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioral control. This research represented the initial study to empirically examine and discuss the relationships among TR and TPB. The integrated model can fully reflect the spirit of TPB and take advantage of technology readiness. Implications of the empirical findings and future research are also discussed. Key words: E-service, theory of planned behavior (TPB), technology readiness (TR), structural equation modeling (SEM).