Internet usage, user satisfaction, task-technology fit, and performance impact among public sector employees in Yemen

The internet technology becomes an essential tool for individuals, organizations, and nations for growth and prosperity. The purpose of this paper is to integrate the DeLone and McLean IS success model with task-technology fit (TTF) to explain the performance impact of Yemeni Government employees.

Questionnaire survey method was used to collect primary data from 530 internet users among employees within all 30 government ministries-institutions in Yemen. The four constructs in the proposed model were measured using existing scales. The data analysis starts with initial exploratory factor analysis, then confirmatory factor analysis and lastly structural equation modeling via AMOS.

The results showed that the proposed integrated model fits the data well. Findings of the multivariate analysis demonstrate four main results. First, actual usage has a strong positive impact on user satisfaction, TTF, and performance impact. Second, user satisfaction has a great influence on performance impact. Third, TTF has a strong positive impact on user satisfaction and performance impact. Fourth, both user satisfaction and TTF mediate the relationship between the actual usage and performance impact.

The public sector in Yemen contains three parts: Yemeni prime minister, Yemeni ministries, and government agencies. This study focuses only on the Yemeni employees among Yemeni ministries; hence the results are not necessarily generalizable. Moreover, there are biases when the researcher measures the actual Internet usage variable through asking a participant about their opinion regarding their usage because these are generally found to differ from the true score of system usage.

The findings should be very useful for the Yemeni Government in presenting the importance of information technology effects on individual efficiency and effectiveness. Therefore, the information from these findings should encourage and support the formation of future policy at the organizational level and national level. If the government utilizes these findings by setting up strategies to promote internet usage, this may, in turn, improve professional practice, personal development, and quality of working life.

This paper adds to the existing literature of information systems by combining actual technology usage, user satisfaction, and TTF to predict performance impact within the organizations. Furthermore, this study proposed a second-order model of performance impact in order to increase the power of explaining the output by the model, which contains four first-order constructs: process, knowledge acquisition, communication quality, and decision quality. The predictive power of the proposed model has a higher ability to explain and predict performance impact compared to those obtained from some of the previous studies.