Drivers of ICT acceptance and implementation in micro-firms in the estate agent sector: influence on organizational performance

ABSTRACT

From the technology acceptance model (TAM), this study aims to identify the drivers of successful implementation of information and communication technology (ICT) in micro-firms and their impact on organizational performance. To this end, a quantitative study was undertaken, where the data-collecting instrument was an online questionnaire administered to a sample of micro-firms belonging to the Portuguese estate agent sector. Based on the results obtained from 102 valid responses, among the drivers identified, internal factors, more precisely, organizational aspects were found to allow successful implementation of ICT in the firms studied here and to be the ones with the greatest influence on their organizational performance. However, external factors, such as external information technology consultants and networking, did not show a statistically significant influence on organizational performance in estate agent micro-firms. The study also presents some implications for theory and practice in this field of research.

KEYWORDS:

• TAM
• micro-firms
• estate agent sector
• ICT
• drivers
• organizational performance

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments that contributed to the development of this paper. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from FCT and FEDER/COMPETE through grant PEst-C/EGE/UI4007/2013.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Mário Franco is an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and SME Administration at the Department of Management and Economics, Beira Interior University, Portugal. He received his PhD in Management from Beira Interior University in 2002. In 1997, he was a doctoral candidate and participated in the European Doctoral Programme in Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management in Spain and Sweden. His research focuses on strategic alliances, business networks, innovation and business creation. He is also a member of a Research Center (CEFAGE-UBI) and currently involved in several research projects on SMEs.

Maria Garcia has a degree in News Technologies and Communication from University of Aveiro in 2012. She has a Master’s degree in Management at Beira Interior University (UBI). Her research focuses on Communication and Information Technology area.

Notes

Sajda Qureshi is the accepting Editor-in-Chief for this article.

1 www.informadb.pt

2 The Cronbach alpha is “defined as the correlation it is expected to obtain between the scale used and other hypothetical scales of the same universe, with the same number of items, measuring the same characteristic” (Fornell & Larcker, 1981).

3 The literature provides various recommendations as to the maximum values considered acceptable for the VIF and for T. Despite the lack of coherence in the literature, the maximum value usually recommended is 10 in the case of VIF. So the VIF recommendation of 10 corresponds to a Tolerance recommendation of 0.10 (i.e. 1/0.10 = 10) (Hair, Black, Babin, Anderson, & Tatham, 2010; Kennedy, 2003).