E-government Adoption in Egypt: Analysis, Challenges and Prospects

The impact of employees' resistance to change on implementing e‐government systems: An empirical study in Egypt

“…Some research papers studying e-government challenges in Egypt refer to resistance to change as one of the challenges of e-government implementation and indicated that employees resist change because they fear losing their jobs. The issue of a lack of trust among government employees, fear of consequences and results of e-government implementation, lack of training programs on using information technology, shortage of IT skills, fear of reducing the employees' role in accomplishing work, inflexibility to modify workflows, lack of integration and information sharing, overlap among service providers, and a lack of unified standards were also mentioned (Gebba & Zakaria, 2015;Zaied & El-Ghareeb, 2017). Osman et al (2012) ascribed staff resistance to use new ICTs in government organizations to inadequate training.…”

“…Based on the previous discussion for any organization to succeed in implementing change employees' resistance to change must be managed so those in charge must identify the cause of this resistance in order to be able to overcome it and implement the change successfully. Thus, employees' resistance to change could be caused by one (or more) of five major reasons: resistance to modern technology; fear of loss of control, 4 Fear of inability to implement change: a lack of IT skills, lack of experience and training in using information technology systems and the ambiguity of information on the change process (Franklin & Aguenza, 2016;Gebba & Zakaria, 2015;Osman et al, 2012;Zaied & El-Ghareeb, 2017).…”

“…But e-government implementation in developing countries encounters various social, political, economic, and legal challenges (Gebba & Zakaria, 2015). Egypt, as a developing country, started to build its communication and information technology infrastructure in 1985 (Zaied & El-Ghareeb, 2017) and started to implement its e-government program in 2001 (Elkadi, 2013). Egypt's e-government portal was inaugurated officially in 2004 (Gebba & Zakaria, 2015).…”

“…Egypt's e-government portal was inaugurated officially in 2004 (Gebba & Zakaria, 2015). However, Egypt, like other developing countries, still encounters many challenges in its efforts to successfully implement e-government initiatives and is still lagging far behind other Arab countries (Zaied & El-Ghareeb, 2017).…”

“…feelings of insecurity, fear of inability to implement change, and fear of workload increasing. Each reason is explained as follows: concerning to the dimensions of employees' resistance to change as independent variables, are developed based on (Al-Ameri, 2013; Franklin & Aguenza, 2016; Gebba & Zakaria, 2015; Osman et al, 2012; Smollan, 2015; Smollan & Pio, 2018; Touchaie & Hashim, 2018; Zaied & El-Ghareeb, 2017):1 Resistance to modern technology: this includes the employee's preference to maintain the status quo, not wanting a change in their routine, a belief that e-government reduces co-operation between employees, a refusal of innovation and new ideas(Franklin & Aguenza, 2016; Touchaie & Hashim, 2018).2 Fear of loss of control: this includes the employee's fear of losing their power and control, the conflict between e-government policies and staff interests, fear of a change in their job, a belief that e-government limits employees' participation in decision making, and a belief that this is an inappropriate time to implement e-government changes (Al-Ameri, 2013;Touchaie & Hashim, 2018).3 Feelings of insecurity: this includes the employee's fear of losing their job, a preference for maintaining work regulations, a conflict between the worker's goals and objectives, adhering to a daily work program, and a belief that the current business is the right business (Al-Ameri, 2013;Gebba & Zakaria, 2015;Smollan, 2015;Smollan & Pio, 2018;Zaied & El-Ghareeb, 2017).…”