The Role of Uncertainty Avoidance on E-Commerce Acceptance across Cultures

As organizations embrace the global business world, the exploitation of the recent advance technologies to communicate between various business partners and customers in different geographical locations worldwide and across countries become eminent. The objective of this paper is to advance our understanding on how e-commerce is being adopted in two different countries rarely studied; Malaysia and Algeria, and how one of the Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, uncertainty avoidance, makes a difference on this adoption. This paper also aims to provide new empirical evidence in the field of cross-cultural e-commerce adoption. This was done by investigating the relationship between perceived usefulness, attitude, and subjective norm in order to assess the differences of behavioral intentions to use e-commerce in the two countries. Results show that uncertainty avoidance still plays an important role across culture in the e-commerce adoption.