Test of the structural model
The research hypotheses were tested by assessing the path coefficients (β) estimated by PLS (see Figure 2). While PLS does not provide model fit indices, the performance of the structural model can be ascertained by the strength and significance of the path coefficients and by the proportion of construct variance (R2) that it explains [69]. Moreover, only path coefficients greater than 0.2 should be considers “truly” significant, since PLS tends to underestimate structural paths when compared with covariance structure-based approaches, such as EQS or LISREL [73].