Insights into Technology Acceptance: A Concise Review of Key Theories and Models

Studies indicate that information technology remains underutilized in numerous organizations, leading to significant economic losses to their businesses. This is due to human behavior towards technology. To address this issue, information technology acceptance has been studied across various organizational contexts to understand user behavior towards Information Technology (IT). Different technology acceptance models have been proposed to understand user behavior toward IT such as Diffusion of Innovation Theory (DoI), Social Cognitive Theory (SCT), Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Extended TAM (TAM2), Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), The Extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and use of Technology (UTAUT2). This paper presents a critical review of the technology acceptance literature where the primary goal of this research is to identify the key technology acceptance models and to identify their major assumptions. Based on this review, this paper demonstrates that these models have yet to fully capture the complex dynamics of the human-technology relationship and have continuously failed to predict as they were claimed to in several empirical experiments.