| For e-businesses, the traditional significance of physical location is minimal; consequently, these organizations must develop new means to differentiate themselves in the highly competitive e-commerce environment. Organizations can achieve differentiation by building a perception of value congruence and avoiding a perception of value conflict.; This study explores how value congruence contributes to the formation of trust in e-businesses and how this trust and value congruence might influence the behavioral intentions of consumers. It was hypothesized that perceived actions, or lack of actions, by organizations regarding moral, social, environmental and political issues may have an effect on the trusting beliefs of e-commerce consumers, and their willingness to disclose personal information and to pay price premiums to those organizations. Subjects were undergraduate business and non-business majors attending a large Southwestern university. Over 800 participated in the study, with 775 contributing usable data in the final analysis. Subjects rated their perceived value congruence with organizations as well as their trusting beliefs, the information they would be willing to disclose and how prone they would be to purchase from three different organizations.; Subjects rated their perceived value congruence relating to the organizations. Two of these were non-profit organizations representing opposing sides of the abortion issue and one was a multinational company with widely publicized values. It was expected that perceptions of shared values would be an important factor in motivating trust and behavioral intentions.; This study found that value congruence played only a minor role in mediating trust for the organizations, but often had a very powerful effect on various behavioral intentions, including subjects' willingness to disclose personal information and to pay price premiums. In most cases the influence of value congruence was greater than the influence of trust, which has been touted in the literature as one of the most important factors in e-commerce.; This research expands prior work by using structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the relative strength and effect of value congruence on each dimension of trust, as well as the overall trust level and the direct effects on behavioral intentions for non-profit and for-profit organizations with differing values. |
