Adoption of socially interactive technologies for shipping services

ABSTRACT

In this research, the effects of the adoption of socially interactive technologies (SIT) for shipping service in ocean freight forwarding on employees’ anxiety and job performance are investigated by adopting the decomposed theory of planned behaviour model. Seven constructs are established from the literature review. Furthermore, the research data and hypotheses examined are analysed using the structural equation modelling approach. The results reveal that perceived usefulness, perceived presence, subject norms, and perceived ease of use are positively related to the adoption of SIT in shipping services, whereas the adoption of SIT is positively related to employees’ job performance and the technology anxiety of using SIT in shipping services is negatively related to employees’ job performance for ocean freight forwarders. Moreover, gender, age, and department have significant moderating effects in the model. The impact of technology anxiety on job performance was stronger on inside female staff than outside male sales representatives, whereas the impact of perceived useful and subjective norms on adoption was stronger on the older and inner groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Socially interactive technology (SIT)
• decomposed theory of planned behaviour
• shipping services
• technology anxiety
• job performance
• ocean freight and logistics service

Acknowledgments

The authors greatly appreciate Prof. W.M. Wu for his valuable and constructive comments on an earlier version of the paper and Mr. Chang-Wei Li for his assistance in data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/03088839.2022.2116751

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science and Technology Council of Taiwan [grant number MOST 110-2410-H-992-035]