Electronic Government in Saudi Arabia: Influence of Culture and Impact on Compliance

Abstract

Governments worldwide continue to roll out a wide array of e-government systems, which are becoming central to government employees’ daily work. This project aims to propose and test a theoretical model of the influence of organisational culture on the use of such systems, and the impact of their use on transparency, accountability and compliance in public organisations. The study is situated in Saudi Arabia. Whatever employees do within e-government systems is potentially recorded and visible to management within their organisations. Researchers and scholars have long considered the consequences of surveillance through data, and concerns have been raised about the implications of surveillance state. Such concerns have led to warnings about the panopticon society, which centre on the fact that e-government systems collect information about citizens that can subsequently be used for the purposes of surveillance and social control. Nonetheless, while considerable attention has been given to the consequences of e-government for citizens, much less has been paid to the implications for government employees, about whom information is also collected; government employees’ awareness that their actions are monitored in such granular detail could influence their behaviour. Similarly, employees’ knowledge that their use of the system is monitored alters their behaviour in other contexts, which may lead to more accountability and compliance. Furthermore, enterprise systems are culturally shaped, as are employees’ attitudes to expectations of organisational monitoring of their conduct. It has been suggested that culture can affect employees’ acceptance of surveillance, and the degree to which surveillance effects changes in employee behaviour in corporate contexts. To achieve the research objective set out above, this project employed explanatory sequential mixed methods. In the first phase, and guided by two theoretical perspectives, Hofstede Theory and Panopticon Theory, a theoretical model was developed based on the results of a systematic literature review, leading to the formulation of testable hypotheses. Survey data was collected form 425 government employees, which was then analysed using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). The results obtained show that various cultural aspects do indeed have an influence on organisations’ use of e-government systems, and the use of such systems does have a positive impact on government workers’ levels of transparency, accountability and compliance. vi In the second phase, qualitative data was collected from 17 Saudi government employees to investigate the results from the first phase in further depth. The interview data was analysed using thematic analysis method; in addition to confirming the findings from the first phase and illustrating each of the confirmed hypotheses in details, interviews also revealed new insights that users’ perceptions of transparency and their accountability and compliance behaviours are also influenced by their personal values and individual personalities, and by e-government system design. Finally, the implications of the research findings for theory and practice are discussed, along with the research limitations and future research directions.