The role of age, gender and self-efficacy in technology acceptance in a test of cultural robustness (Jamaica)

For several years IT has been seen to be the engine of substantial productivity gains. However what has happened is that companies have spent millions of dollars deploying new technology only to see it being underutilized by employees.; The Technology Acceptance Model is one of the models used to study the problem of low adoption or underutilization of technology. However, despite the success in the predictive powers of the model, increasingly there have been calls to study the robustness of TAM in other cultural settings. Notably, Hofstede (1994) posited that many social science theories are culture centric and Straub, Keil and Brenner (1997) noted that with the advancement of globalization, we need to know how widely the model applies in other countries.; This study therefore acquired data from individuals from several organizations in Jamaica so as to assess the explanatory and predictive power of the model in a different cultural setting. Using seven variables external to the core TAM model, this study found that the model does hold in Jamaica. However some surprising findings include that there was no significant effect of Age and Gender, and that Subjective Norm was found to be significant even though it was found to hold before only where usage was mandatory.