How self-efficacy and gender issues affect software adoption and use

Abstract

Today's computer software packages have potential to change how business is con-ducted, but only if organizations recognize their usefulness and ease of use. For an organization to benefit fully from its investments, training initiatives geared toward creating " buy-in " are needed to ensure the successful adoption of software packages [10]. This article presents research findings on how one such initiative, a simple tuto-rial, affected user confidence in mastering software, and subsequently the likelihood of successful use and adoption of the package. Women and men were found to relate to the tutorial differently, which suggests that gender should be taken into consider-ation when creating marketing and training strategies [4]. The study participants were eighty MBA students, 52 men and the 28 women, enrolled at a U.S. university. They completed questionnaires measuring their com-puter experience and their self-efficacy beliefs concerning their ability to use Microsoft's FrontPage 98 to create and maintain a Web site. The self-efficacy ques-tionnaire is shown in Table 1. Self-efficacy is the measure of one's confidence in mas-tering a new challenge. When self-efficacy is high, one believes a high probability exists that one will be successful, while low self-efficacy suggests a limited belief one will accomplish an objective. It can be assessed at a holistic level, where one judges one's ability to accomplish objectives in general, or at a task level. Bolstering self-effi-cacy is important because it affects one's willingness to invest effort into purchasing, learning, and using software. The participants had no previous experience with FrontPage 98. Each completed a hands-on tutorial designed to provide a brief, controlled exposure to the software. The Web sites built by the participants while completing the tutorial were graded to ensure the tutorial had been completed correctly. Afterwards, participants completed another set of questionnaires measuring their perceptions of the software package's ease of use, usefulness, and their self-efficacy beliefs about their ability to use Microsoft's FrontPage 98 to build and maintain a Web site after completing the tuto-rial. Following are highlights of our main findings: