The Differential Effect of Privacy-Related Trust on Groupware Application Adoption and Use during the COVID-19 pandemic

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The COVID-19 pandemic lockdown lead to the rapid adoption and use of various groupware applications(“apps”) for remote connection with colleagues, friends, and family. Different factors such as user experiences, trust, and social influences (“user-situational motivations”) were instrumental in determining how and what apps people adopted and used, especially at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this empirical study, we examine how these factors and four predominant user-situational motivations (i.e., the mandated use of an app by an employer/institution, recommended use of an app by an employer/institution, recommended use of an app by a peer(s), and self-selection of an app) influenced the rapid adoption and use of groupware applications. Specifically, we develop an “emergency adoption model” of groupware applications using 195 valid survey responses to highlight the factors that motivated these apps’ use at the onset of COVID-19pandemic lockdown. We leverage the Technology Adoption Model (TAM) and integrate it with the users’ past use of the application before the COVID-19 lockdown, user-situational motivation, and their privacy-related trust in the application provider to develop a more comprehensive model. Using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM), we find that the users who used a groupware app in the past continued to use it, and in line with TAM, users’ intention to adopt and use a groupware application was largely driven by the ease-of-use and usefulness of the app. Furthermore, while not a part of the traditionalTAM model, we find that trust in the application provider plays an important role in emergency adoption. However, unlike typical adoption models, the nature of all these effects—most prominently that related to privacy-related trust—depend on the underlying situational motivation. We discuss the implications of these findings and suggest ways to improve the adoption and use of groupware applications, especially during crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.