Adopting Social Network Sites - The Role of Individual IT Culture and Privacy Concerns

In this paper, we examine the role of the concepts of Individual IT Culture (IITC) and Privacy Concerns in IT adoption using the example of the social network site (SNS) Facebook. Analyzing data from a large online survey with Partial Least Squares (PLS), we show that IITC is an antecedent for Privacy Concerns and the TAM sub-constructs Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU) and Perceived Usefulness (PU). However, contrary to our hypothesis, Privacy Concerns do not have a significant negative effect on the Intention to Use Facebook. The remaining relationships in the TAM (PEOU -> PU; PEOU -> Intention; PU -> Intention, Intention -> Usage) are confirmed. Besides, we contribute to better validate the assessment instrument for IITC as we show by means of a reflective first-order formative second-order construct that six sub-constructs of IITC do have a significant influence on IITC whereas one sub-construct does not.