Organizational context, climate and innovativeness: adoption of imaging technology

Managers make decisions to adopt technological innovations within an organizational context. This research explores the role of organizational climate as it affects the impacts of organizational context on innovativeness. Context refers here to organizational size, slack resources, and organizational age. We analyze three known climate dimensions as moderator variables: risk orientation, external orientation, and achievement orientation. Data describe the adoption of medical imaging technologies by 70 hospitals. Climate measures come from several technology decision-makers within each organization. Technology measures of radicalness and relative advantage are ratings by five outside experts in the use of these 68 technologies. The study also includes the traditional measure that counts the overall number of innovations adopted. Innovativeness is a multi-dimensional composite variable composed of radicalness, relative advantage, and number of innovations adopted. As expected, results show that organizational size and slack are positively related with innovativeness. Hierarchical regression analyses indicate that the climate measures of risk orientation and external orientation interact significantly with the context dimensions of organizational size and organizational age. The model developed and tested in this project explains over 50% of the total variance in innovativeness. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.