TAM was derived from TRA to model user acceptance of IT.
TAM posits that perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease-of-use (PEOU) affect the acceptance and use of IT. PU is the extent to which "people believe that the technology will help them perform their job better" [11] while PEOU is "the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would be free of effort.".
Using different methodologies, numerous studies have found that PU and PEOU correlate well with IT acceptance across a wide variety of information systems. Table 1 lists some of the many empirical studies which have empirically tested TAM.
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2.1. Possible Effects of Cultural Differences on Technology Acceptance.
While considerable research has been directed toward understanding the adoption and diffusion of IT in U.S. firms (for a review of this literature, see [27]), there have been only a handful of studies that specifically examine possible cultural effects on the adoption and diffusion of new information technologies (e.g. [15, 23, 28, 30]). Research on the impact of corporate culture on IT acceptance provides a useful viewpoint [5, 22], but ethnic or national culture research undoubtedly has a special character. Nevertheless, based on the research that has been conducted to date, there is reason to believe that connections do exist between culture and the use of certain information technologies. .
2.2. Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions and their Impact on Technology Acceptance.
Hofstede's research [16] on cultural dimensions provides a theoretical foundation for exploring the impact of cultural differences on the adoption and diffusion of IT-based innovations such as E-Mail. He describes four dimensions that can be used to distinguish among different cultures: power-distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and individualism. Table 2 lists the four dimensions along with a brief description of each.