Organizational Buyers’ Acceptance of Electronic Procurement Services—An Empirical Investigation in Indian Firms

This paper presents an extension to the technology acceptance model (TAM) that empirically investigates the impact of managerial interventions (user training, top management support, and technical support) and user-level cognitive belief factors (perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived complexity and trust) in influencing organizational buyers’ behavioral intention to accept e-procurement services. The primary objective of our research is to evaluate an extended technology acceptance model to understand organizational buyers’ intention to accept e-procurement services thereby integrating both organizational and user-level factors in a mandatory acceptance environment. Further, to develop finer-grained insights, we also investigate the mediating roles of the cognitive belief factors in the relationship between managerial interventions and behavioral intention. Unlike most prior e-procurement research, we focus on individual buyers’ acceptance intention, rather than examining e-procurement implementation and adoption issues at the organizational level. We test our hypotheses with survey data collected from 132 organizational buyers utilizing e-procurement services. The results show that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived complexity, and trust are the direct predictors of organizational buyers’ behavioral intention to accept e-procurement services. There is no direct effect of managerial interventions on behavioral intention to accept e-procurement services.