Citizen's Adoption of an E-Government System: Validating the Extended Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA)

Introduction

For much of the last two decades, governments across the world have been adopting and expanding an innovative means of delivering government information and services to citizens (G2C), businesses (G2B), and governments (G2G). This phenomenon is known as electronic government or e-government (hereafter, eGov) (Norris and Reddick, 2013). In other words, eGov refers to the use of information technology (IT) (such as wide area network, the Internet, mobile computing etc.) by governments to expand the access and delivery of its information and service to its citizens, business partners, professionals, other organisations, and even government entities (Lin et al., 2011; McClure, 2000; Symonds, 2000; West, 2004) themselves. EGov allows citizens to search and obtain information at their own convenience without any limitations of geographical locations. The interactive nature of eGov provides benefits for citizens and officials alike (West, 2008). EGov is a key element in the transformation of any government, serving as a means towards improving transparency, accountability, and good governance; making the government more result-oriented, efficient and citizen-centric; and enabling citizens and businesses to access government services and information as efficiently and as effectively as possible through the use of internet and other channels of communication (Aggelidid and Chatzoglou, 2009; Lin et al., 2011; Rana et al., 2011; Simintiras et al., 2014).

When eGov first became a sustainable solution to the diffusion of government information, experts believed that the rise of G2C services would improve government transparency, enhance civic engagement, and offer new and innovative service possibilities. These G2C services were expected to cut-out information middle-men and let users interact directly with their government (Taylor et al., 2014). As e-government has matured into a vibrant socio-technical system covering issues of governance, societal trends, technological change, information management, interaction, and human factors (Dawes, 2009), G2C services have become one of the central uses of e-government (Evans and Yen, 2006; Rana et al., 2013d; Reddick, 2004; Taylor et al., 2014).

E-government services can be largely categorised into informational and transactional services. Informational services refer to the delivery of government information through Web pages whereas transactional services enable users to complete transactions such as obtaining visas, licenses, passports, birth and death records etc. online safely and securely (Howard, 2001; Norris and Moon, 2005). At one hand, e-government provides a number of benefits to its stakeholders including reducing corruption, citizen-oriented focus, promoting e-democracy, delivering more accountable, transparent, cost-effective, and easily accessible public services, prevailing over the social divide, and faster adaptation to meet citizens’ requirements (Akman et al., 2005; Hackney et al., 2007; Huang and Bwoma, 2003; Watson and Mundy, 2001). On the other hand, governments face a number of challenges in implementing transactional e-government services (Al-Sebie and Irani, 2005; Gauld et al., 2010), and these challenges are reflected in the low deployment rate of such services (Venkatesh et al., 2012). About 98% of the countries in the world have developed government websites with less than one-third providing transactional services, such as online form submission (United Nations, 2010). Therefore, it is very important to understand the adoption of such transactional eGov services.