Sustainable Adoption of E-Government from the UTAUT Perspective

Abstract

This paper attempts to study the sustainable adoption of e-government services in northern Iraq. The well-known unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) is applied and extended to study citizens’ behavior regarding e-government services. A quantitative technique was utilized to gauge the efficiency of the model. Overall, 371 replies were received through distributing samples. SPSS software was used for the data evaluation. Two extra constructs were introduced in the study, i.e., “Trust of system (TOS)” and “Ethics of Internet (EOI)”, into the original UTAUT as the theoretical extension. The findings indicate that all constructs have a significant influence on the intention to use e-government services. Moreover, the EOI moderates the effects of TOS on social impacts (SI), performance expectancy (PE), and behavior intention (BI). The results also indicated that there were statistically significant differences in the demographic characteristics of age, educational level excluding gender, and behavioral intention to use e-government services. The study’s results support most of the hypotheses. The results contribute to a better knowledge of the factors affecting the sustainable adoption of e-government in northern Iraq.