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Top1. Introduction
In Saudi Arabia (KSA), the significance of e-government (e-gov) in developing the social life and creating a knowledge-based society has been recognised by the government (YESSER, 2006, 2016), however the implemented strategies and models have been designed to fit the social life in western countries. Thus, they may not be appropriate to be applied on an eastern country such as “KSA” and ignoring the differences of the social and cultural systems (Hofstede, 2011; Hofstede et al., 2010). E-gov adoption and execution is considered a defiance to many governments in the globe (Alzahrani et al., 2017). The explanation behind that could be the wrong conviction that findings of the adoption and implementation of e-gov in a specific context could be smoothly applied in another different context. However, it is not that simple to generalise the result of such implementation by assuming a global context as each country’s needs are different than the others bearing in mind its specific context. Therefore, any attempt to apply such global tactic of the adoption of e-gov in all contexts may hinder the achievement of the main goals of e-gov (Al-Hujran et al., 2015; Alomari et al., 2012). “KSA” with its ambition to achieve vision of 2030 as the heart of Arab and Islamic world is energetically trying to adopt and implement e-gov services and applications in its public and private sectors institutions.
In contexts of e-commerce and the Internet, technology adoption from the customers’ standpoint has been considerably studied (Agag and El-Masry, 2016a; Al-Debei et al., 2013). However, the way that trust affects e-gov success has recived less attention (Bélanger and Carter, 2008; Srivastava and Teo, 2009), wherein both Trust toward government and technology have been considered as fundamental success factors (Bélanger and Carter, 2008; Lee et al., 2011a; Srivastava and Teo, 2009). Positive users’ trust of a great provision of government services will positively influence their trust to use other services provided by their government (Al-Hujran et al., 2015). In addition, positive users’ trust of technology as a mean will positively enhance their trust to use online services offered by their government.
Building a good relationship with the public becomes a struggle for a lot of governments globally. Many studies’ results have proven that there is a dramatic decline in the users’ Trust toward their government e.g. (Alzahrani et al., 2017; Hibbing and Theiss, 2001). In fact, studies have shown that digitalised government – or e-gov – technologies can be considered as keys to enhance and build a good relationships between governments and their users (Nam, 2018; Ravishankar, 2013; Shareef et al., 2016). It has been considered as an effective tool to enhance the inner performance, the excellence’s degree of service delivery and users’ engagements (Dwivedi et al., 2016; Rana and Dwivedi, 2015; Rana et al., 2016). Moreover, some regard it as a powerful tool to build, improve and relief trust between users and their governments (Sandeep and Ravishankar 2014; Grimmelikhuijsen and Knies, 2017).