Determining Underlying Factors that Influence Online Social Network Usage Among Public Sector Employees in the UAE

Recently, there has been a rising concern over technology dependency, especially with the revolution of online social networking, which becomes the biggest phenomenon. It harnesses a web application to build social relations with other people who share similar personal or career interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections. There is a lot of research, which have been done in the field of Online Social Network Usage, but studies indicate the lack of research has been conducted for determining underlying factors that influence online social network usage among public sector employees in the UAE. This study employs structural equation modeling via AMOS to analyze 401 valid questionnaires for the assessment of the proposed model that is based on Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology to identify the factors that affect the use of online social networks (OSN). The current research focused in one of Abu Dhabi’s public organizations, the Tourism Development and Investment Company. The main independent constructs in the model are related to performance, effort, social influence, and facilitating conditions about the use of OSN. The dependent constructs cover actual utilization of OSN. This paper describes the relations among the various constructs. Our work improved our insights on the online social networking model. Results indicated all four independent variables significantly predicted the actual usage of OSN with various percentages. The proposed model explained 50% of the variance in actual usage.