The Utilisation of Uniform Backgrounds in Indonesia: Individual Cultural Factors and Perceived Benefits

Abstract

As COVID-19 spreads, the Indonesian government urges workers to keep their distance and carry out activities at home, including studying from home and working from home whenever possible. Face-to-face or offline meetings such as teaching and learning processes, meetings, even national and international conferences that were originally held in person or offline have turned into online meetings. As time goes by, the use of online meeting technology creates a new behavior, which is a uniform background in online meeting activities. This phenomenon opens up the possibility to investigate the reason why they use background features during online meetings. Based on the previous literature, we hypothesised that in this phenomenon, the perceived benefits of changing the background based on the demand of the event organizer are driven by internal stimuli, in particular individualism and collectivism. We conducted a survey of 302 respondents and examined using the covariance-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The results showed that the internal stimuli in particular individualism and collectivism factors had no effect on Perceived Economic Benefit (PEB) and Perceived Social Benefit (PSB) when using Virtual Background in online meetings. However, the Individualism and Collectivism factors had a positive influence on Perceived Hedonic Benefit (PHB) and had a negative influence on Perceived Altruistic Benefit (PAB) when using Virtual Background in online meeting activities.