DEVELOPMENT
Khalifa Elgosbi
Yousef Alshrari
NIU-ETR-522
December 2, 2016
Introduction
Professional development helps to improve and support individuals’ skills and knowledge
about a variety of topics related to their careers. In general, the purpose is to get them to the level
that meets their workplace objectives and helps them maintain their self-confidence as
employees to complete the tasks required by their employers (Shaha & Ellsworth, 2013).
Professional development means, “the sum total of formal and informal learning experiences
Numerous studies have shown that online learning is almost as efficient as face-to-face
education (Alwadie, 2013; Busquets & Bernal, 2013). As indicated by a notable number of
studies, the online environment created a place that could be utilized to deliver professional
development for many sectors, such as businesses, health organizations, education centers, and
industrial cities (Vrasidas & Zembylas, 2004). Online professional development is defined as
providing training on “the internet as a means for delivering information and communication
students’ performance and teacher’s professional development, it is still not popular in the
workplace environment due to the misunderstandings about the benefits of online learning in the
workplace environment. Perhaps workplace decision makers have not realized that technology is
an essential medium to make the content of professional development readily available online for
their employees. No matter how it is slowly gaining in popularity, especially in Saudi Arabia,
online professional development is still lacking full swing in workplace contexts (Hur & Im
2013; Yoo & Han 2013). Hence, this study investigates to what extent the attitudinal factors
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(performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and social influence) predict employees’ behavioral
intention to use online professional development at King Abdullah Medical City in Saudi Arabia.
In the last two decades of research, there has been a considerable shift toward
investigating and exploring employees’ intention when adopting new technology for
development or training purposes (Rabak & Cleveland-Innes 2006; Vu, Cao, Vu, & Cepero
2014). Therefore, technology acceptance theories are required when we need to understand the
acceptance level among individuals and organizations of new technology (Bauer et al. , 2005).
According to Bagozzi (2007) , most of these theories are based on the psychological models that
have been used to capture the individual behavior in accepting new innovation. Prior to
implement any new technology, recognizing factors that might positively or negatively impact
the implementation of technologies are imperative. One of these factors is the intention of users
toward the technology before they use it (Min, Ji, & Qu , 2008). Thus, the Unified Theory of
Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) is used in this study as a guide to examine
employees’ intention toward using online professional development. The UTAUT model was
founded by (Venkatesh, Morris, Davis, G. B., & Davis, F. D., 2003). According to Venkatesh et
al. (2003), there are three factors in the UTAUT model that can determine the intention to use
technology, namely performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and social influence. Whereas,
intention and facilitating conditions are direct factors of usage behavior. Numerous studies
showed that the UTAUT model can explain up to 70% of variance in the users’ acceptance
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Literature Review
development in Thailand and they examined the adaption among “multiple levels of health-
related information systems including community health center (CHC) information systems” (p.
405). They wanted to know how the understanding of employees and organization affected
users’ acceptance of technology. Their survey was a questionnaire type and the survey question
targeted information about employees’ intention to adopt new technology. They used the
constructs of Venkatesh et al. (2003), model which measured the five variables, namely
voluntariness. The participants were randomly selected from 1607 community health centers
around 13 provinces in Thailand. Their analyses benefited from using an updated version of
SPSS multivariate analysis which utilized multiple regression, discriminant analysis, logistic
regression, and analysis of variance. The authors concluded that the factors predicting
facilitating conditions, and voluntariness, and they emphasized that performance expectancy is
the most significant factor. Finally, it was confirmed by the results of the study that the UTAUT
model was a valid research framework for investigating and exploring healthcare employees’
Similarly, Ching, and Hung (2011) conducted a study in which they aimed to measure the
and industrial sectors. They stated that their study was intended to compare online instructions to
face to face instructions in terms of effectiveness on learning achievement. Their study was a
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quasi-experimental and they used pretest and posttest design to determine whether the treatment
used in the online learning instructions influenced the learning achievement of the participants.
The participants were randomly selected from employees of Taiwanese company called Yu-Yi
Ltd. Co. They utilized “The Online Technologies Self-Efficacy Scale (OTSES) and Self-
Efficacy Toward Classroom Learning instrument” (p. 460) as their pretest and posttest
instrument for collecting the needed data. The findings of their study indicated significant in the
relationships between computer experience and socioeconomic status; however gender and self-
efficacy did not show significant relationship. According to Ching, and Hung (2011), this can be
explained in terms of the strong impact of online learning on learner performance in professional
development programs. The results of this study were consistent with previous research
regarding the notions of satisfaction having positive relationship with self-efficacy and computer
technology. The study included the investigation of how eLearning would help minimize the cost
and expenditure to meet the changing condition of social economic challenges. The author
departed from the question whether eLearning can impact bank employees’ performance in the
workplace and the hypotheses that gender and frequency of training programs will affect
attitudes of the employees toward professional development. In this study, the researcher
included 100 bank employees, both male and female, in the sample. Quota sampling technique
was used to target all the population of bank employees as his target population, then participants
were giving equal chance to participate in the study. The author stated that the independent
variables were age, gender, educational level, profession, and division of work; whereas, the
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dependent variables included the participants attitudes and achievement of performance. The
analyses showed that 75% of the participants were aware that online professional development
was essential for improving their job performance. In addition the study indicated that frequency
of using the electronic professional development for training purposes resulted in high
percentages in creating job satisfaction among the employees. The participants also highlighted
the significant of online professional development as being a flexible tool for the on job training
in terms of place and time. Although the author did not mention any limitation, it seems that the
small sample size might be considered as a concern when looking at the results.
Also, Kyalo and Hopkins (2013) conducted a study to investigate online professional
development and employees’ acceptance in a medical training center of an East African country.
Of the target population which was 700 employees, they selected 120 participants for their data
collection procedures. Their survey included demographical information and variables related
usefulness and ease of use. The authors used TAM model as their theoretical framework because
they wanted to measure their participants’ attitudes toward the use of online professional
development. The described the training center in which they carried their study as being the
largest in East and Central Africa, with more than 50 different medical and health courses and
providing training services for about 14000 trainees from different regions in Africa. The
purpose of the study was to examine attitudes of employees about online professional
development as compared to traditional classroom training. Their research design was a mixed
method which included both a quantitative survey and qualitative focus group discussions.
According to the authors, this research design was used to fortify the results of the study and the
data which they collected was covering the variables of “socio-demographic characteristics, user
rate of OL, perceived usefulness of OL, and beliefs, experiences and attitude towards online
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learning as a tool for continuous professional development” (p. 85). The authors concluded that
their study revealed significant levels of satisfaction toward online professional development
among the participants despite the fact that technology provision and delivery modes are still
evolving in Kenya, where online professional development is suffering from high rates of
adoption and confrontation to use online professional development at one of the Greece bank
referred to as ‘the Bank’. The author also investigated participants’ perceptions toward online
learning based on their demographical information such as age, marital status, educational level,
and job position at the bank. She assumed that defining causes that impact employees’ views
about online learning, would provide essential information to instructional designers when
creating or redesigning online courses that will meet their trainees’ needs. The author mentioned
that there were four online courses that being offered by the bank to its employees. These
courses are “a) Mortgage loans b) Prevention of money laundering and terrorism financing c)
Investment Services d) Retail banking” (p. 110). These courses were available to employees only
through the bank intranet service meaning that employees have no access to the online training
outside the bank. There are a number of factors that undergone this study to access employees’
reward/recognition.” (p. 112). The author used a mixed methods in her study to get an in depth
understanding of employees’ views about the online learning course that has been offered to
them at the bank for a short while. She sent out a survey questionnaire to 300 employees and out
of the 300 only 104 participants had fully completed the online survey. The author used SPSS
and analyzed the data using chi-square test. Then interviews were conducted on some employees
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based on their demographical information. The author concluded that employees have a positive
perceptions and had no problem using online learning at their workplace. Participants have
indicated that they have relatively enough experience using computers and surfing the internet to
improve their professional development. Also, the author mentioned that the results of this study
were confirmed with other previous studies that admitted that participants’ opinion about
computer and internet usage are important. The researcher mentioned that the online courses
offered by the bank need some enhancement to allow for more participation for employees. The
author also stated out that interruption from colleagues during the online course session was one
of the barrier that most participants faced with online learning. Finally, the author stated that this
study could not be generalized to other banks in Greece and recommended to replicate this
research with a large sample number from different banks in the area.
The demand for incorporating online learning in the corporate environment is increasing.
Due to the fact that employees need to be up-to-date with job related skills and knowledge, many
organizations conduct training policies for developing the potential of their manpower. This
literature review showed the importance of online learning in the workplace environment to
improve employees’ professional development aspects. It also showed how eLearning would
help minimize the cost and expenditure to meet the changing condition of social economic
challenges (Hur & Im 2013; Karaaslan, 2013; Yoo & Han 2013).
development. The results of many research studies indicated the relationship between these
factors and employees’ attendance and participation in online training programs. It is worth
noting here that this synthesis did not include all the possible factors due to paucity of studies in
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this area. Therefore, some researchers recommended that the aspect of cultural perspectives
should be further examined to identify more factors related to the successful implementation of
online professional development (Karaaslan, 2013; Hur & Im, 2013; Rabak & Cleveland-Innes
Methodology
Participants
The research sample of this study included (n=146) participants currently working as
employees in King Abdullah Medical City. The response rate was 96.6 %, which represents the
number of 141 respondents who completed and returned the electronic survey. The sample
included 36 (25.5%) females and 78 (55.3%) males; whereas, 28 (19.8%) of the respondents
prefer not to answer the gender question. The age of the participants ranged between the 18 and
55 years old. As to the participants educational level, 30 % percent of the participants have a
bachelor degree. All participants knew in advance that participation in this study is voluntarily
Research Design
behavioral intention to use online professional development (Venkatesh et al., 2003). As defined
by Creswell, (2015) “Survey research designs are procedures in quantitative research in which
investigators administer survey to a sample or to the entire population of people to describe the
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Therefore, the researchers utilized a Five-Likert-scale survey with 15 items, adapted from
Venkatesh et al. (2003), after adjusting it so that it contains the three main constructs of the
UTAUT model (performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and social influence) as the
independent variables, which are considered continuous. The dependent variable of this study
responses. The research question designed for this study is: to what extent do performance
expectancy, effort expectancy, and social influence predict employees’ behavioral intention to
use online professional development? Based on the research question the researchers developed
two hypotheses, namely the null hypothesis and the alternative hypothesis:
H0= There is no relationship between the attitudinal factors and employees’ behavioral intention
H1= There is a relationship between the attitudinal factors and employees’ behavioral intention
Procedure
Convenience sampling was used in this study because participants were “willing and
available to be studied” (Creswell, 2015 p. 145). Employees’ emails were obtained from the
internal website of the medical city. Using Quartlics survey application, the researchers created
an electronic survey. The researchers generated a survey link and sent it to the selected
Analysis
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An updated version of SPSS was used to statistically analyze the data gathered by means
of the survey. To answer the research question of this study, multiple regression was used to
evaluate how the independent variables can explain the percentage of variance to predict
Results
First the data were screened for any missing values and outliers. The results showed there
were less than 5% missing values of the data and some outliers with two extreme values. To
overcome this issue we changed the cases to the next-highest scores plus one. As for the missing
values, the percentage of the missing values is (3.4%) to the total values in the study indicated
that the percentage of the missing values is non-problematic issue to the data and no need to use
the hot-deck imputation or other techniques to fix the missing values. Finally and before doing
the linear regression, the scores of the three independent variables (performance expectancy,
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The histogram of the dependent variable showed a normal distribution which indicate
that the assumption of normality of residuals is been met. However, the Kurtosis is evident
because it is more than 2.58. By looking at the Scatterplot, we can say that the homoscedasticity
assumption has been met and not violated. It showed equal variance throughout the Scatterplot.
Looking at the Model Summary table (shown in table 3), we can conclude that 68.8 % of
the variance can explain employees’ intention to use online professional development. These
results indicated that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and social influence were
F (3, 137) =100.808, p < 0.001. R2 .688. Since F statistics assess the ratio of the mean square of
the regression to the mean square of the residual. F = 100.880 showed that the ratio of systematic
variance to unsystematic variance was considered to be high. From the ANOVA table, we can
see that there is a significant relationship between the attitudinal factors and employees’
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intention, p value is less than .001. Thus, according to the alpha criterion (alpha=.05) we reject
assess the values of tolerance and VIF. Statistically speaking, it can be concluded that there is no
multicollinearity violation because tolerance values are above 0.1 and VIF values are below 10.
We can see that effort expectancy and social influence were significant factors in predicting
employees’ behavioral intention with p < .001. Performance expectancy, on the other hand, did
not significantly predict employees’ intention with p = .152, which is larger than the alpha level
of .05.
Discussion
This study was designed to investigate which of the (UTAUT) attitudinal factors
The findings of this study pointed out that employees’ behavioral intention can be predicted by
two significant factors which are effort expectancy and social influence with (p < .001). These
results are consistent with previous research, which indicated that employees’ behavioral
intention can be predicted by effort expectancy and social influence (Kijsanayotin et al., 2009).
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These factors are considered to be the most significant factors in the UTAUAT model, which
were highly used by researchers to measure intention. Although the factor of ‘performance
expectancy’ was not significant in this study, it was a significant factor to determine the intention
in a previous study (Yoo & Han 2013). According to Venkatesh et al. (2003), the constructs of
UTAUT model can explain the variance of employees’ behavioral intention to use online
professional development by 70%. This study also showed that effort expectancy and social
influence variables were the most influential factors in determining employees’ behavioral
intention to use online professional development. What is interesting in the findings of this study
is the striking similarity between this study and the findings of Venkatesh et al. (2003), with very
Overall, this study found that employees’ effort expectancy and social influence were significant
factors to predict employees’ intention to use online professional development in the workplace
environment. This study can provide workable implication for decision makers and instructional
designers to consider these factors before implementing online professional development for
their employees. We expect that these factors will help in determining the acceptance level
among employees to use online training at Prince Abdullah Medical City. Future research is
recommended to include performance expectancy and facilitating condition to measure the actual
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