Generating Trust in E-Services through Service Quality: The Moderating Role of Technology Readiness

Trust is considered as a crucial objective in e-commerce. However the antecedents of e-trust are still not very clearly understood. Several authors have considered e-service quality as an antecedent of e-trust. While the empirical relationship between e-service quality and e-trust has been established in may studies, we still don’t know much about the possible moderators with regard to this relationship. Our paper looks at the moderating role of Technology Readiness in the relationship between the different dimensions of e-service quality and e-trust. Technology readiness is an important construct as this reflects the individual’s ability and readiness to interact with technology. Since the internet is shown to induce some level of technology anxiety among its users, it is possible that people with high level of technology readiness will use the internet more and become more familiar with the technology. Since familiarity is often considered as a pre-condition to generate trust, it is therefore natural to assume that users with high levels of technology readiness will also have a stronger relationship between service quality and e-trust. Similarly users with low levels of technology readiness will be less familiar with the technology and consequently may have a less stronger relationship between the perceived level of e-service quality and e-trust. We focus on four different dimensions of e-service quality – efficiency, fulfillment, systems availabiligy and privacy. The propositions are tested through an empirical study conducted among users of job-sites in India. About 350 responses were collected to test the hypotheses. In general the moderating effect of TRI was quite evident except in the case of the relationship between privacy and e-trust. Results show that technology readiness index does have a positive moderating role as proposed across all the four dimensions of e-service quality. The moderating role is not very significant in the case of the relationship between privacy and e-trust.