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It is well accepted that information technology (IT) is largely influential in certain parts of the service industry such as hospitality and tourism (Andreu, Aldas, Bigne, & Mattila, 2010; Buhalis & Law, 2008). This is because the industry of hospitality and tourism is highly information intensive (Camison, 2000). As such, hotel managers in trying to improve cost and operational efficiency, and in turn to improve the competitiveness of their businesses, have been utilizing information technologies in the last decade (Huh, Kim, & Law, 2009). Therefore, “the extent to which hotel staff accept IT at work is thus of paramount importance to the success of a hotel’s business” (Huh et al., 2009, p. 121).
However, few studies have been conducted in the context of the hotel environment investigating the acceptance of IT at work (Lam, Cho, & Qu, 2007). These studies tried to examine the degree to which Davis’s (1986) Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and its extensions was applicable to the hospitality and tourism industry (Kaplanidou & Vogt, 2006; Kim, Lee, & Law, 2008). Thus, it is argued that the employee acceptance of information technologies research in the hospitality and tourism context is in its infancy stage (Huh et al., 2009).
To fill this gap, and further examine the process through which perceived IT beliefs influence behavioural intention to use IT in a non-US/UK context, this paper investigates how employee attitudes, mediate this process in the Greek hotel industry context. The hotel industry is a leading industry in Greece, employing 9.3 percent of the economically active population of Greece and contributing 15.20 percent to gross domestic product of Greece (SETE, 2010). Specifically, based on Lam et al. (2007), we present and test an operational model where individual factors such as task-technology fit, self-efficacy, and individual contingencies, and social factors such as subjective norm have a major influence on the state on technology acceptance, indicating that perceived IT beliefs influence behavioral intention through employee attitudes. Therefore, it is clear that the purpose of this paper is twofold:
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To investigate the causal relationship between perceived IT beliefs and behavioural intention in the Greek hotel industry context.
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To improve the understanding of why and how perceived IT beliefs influence behavioural intention to use IT in the Greek hotel industry context.
To investigate the relationship between perceived IT beliefs and behavioural intention in the Greek hotel industry context, we start in the next section with the presentation of the main elements of the theoretical background, we discuss an operational model, and we develop the hypotheses to be tested. This is followed by details of methodology adopted for this analysis. The next section summarizes the results and then it presents discussion with respect to key findings. Finally, the main conclusions of the study are presented, along with the contributions, limitations, and implications of the analysis.