Determining the awareness of users towards E-signature: A scale development study

Abstract

The necessity of e-signature has been accepting by all organizations like finance, education, business. With the effect of this, the popularity has been increasing day by day especially uncertainty times such as the Covid-19 pandemic. However, there is a missing gap in the literature about e-signature studies. The literature review showed that the studies on e-signature awareness and the benefits of e-signature usage in any organization or/and the person are not enough. For this reason, the purpose of the study is to develop a valid and reliable scale to use in scientific studies to understand the awareness of users towards e-signature. Therefore, both validity and reliability of scale have been investigated. Through the exploratory factor analysis, the AoE-sign scale has 16 items and 2 subfactors which are "Awareness"and "Benefits". The factor analysis results indicated that Cronbach Alpha for Awareness was.888, for Benefits was.790 and for the overall scale was.889. Consequently, the study results demonstrated that the AoE-sign scale is reliable and valid tool and the developed scale could be used by top-level managers, in developing countries such as Cyprus, to be able to understand the awareness level of users. Moreover, they can organize staff training on e-signature to make it possible to use e-signature efficiently in the organizations.