Innovative Attitudes, Values, and Intentions in Organizations [1]

Abstract

In this paper we explore the relationships between some of the various concepts and scales that have been used to characterize innovative attitudes and behaviours. A sample (N = 123) of undergraduate and graduate business students with full-time jobs or the equivalent provided questionnaire data to test two initial hypotheses. It was found that four attitude-value scales which have been used to measure change values, innovation orientation, readiness for change, and innovativenesss, are intercorrelated significantly when no distinction is made between the respondents' intentions to be innovative and respondents' actual innovative behaviour. Innovative and change attitudes, as measured by these same four scales, do consistently predict multiple innovative intentions and behaviours but not, as expected, single behaviours or single intentions. The single best predictor in a multiple regression of the combined multiple innovative intention-behaviour measure was found to be a creative scale (R2 = 0.43, p < 0.01). The innovative behaviour scale was tentatively called attitude toward being innovative. A factor analysis of this scale revealed dimensions related to innovative behaviour in organizations : the innovator, the preserver of the status quo, and the unchallenged, dissatisfied person.Two other hypotheses were also tested. The first was that the perceived organization risk-taking climate would moderate the relationship between these attitude measures. This hypothesis was not supported by the overall results. However, moderate support was found for the hypothesis that the more formal authority a person has in an organization, the greater the consistency between change attitudes and innovative behaviours as measured by self-report methods.

Key dimensions of personal innovativeness

“…Although no issues were identified with regard to the Ettlie and O'Keefe (1982) Innovativeness Scale itself the fact that this survey collected data from practicing managers means that a Scoring Scale developed from this data may well be both different to and of greater value than the Whetton and Cameron (2011) Scoring Scale. In the event two alternative Scoring Scales were developed from the current data set and are presented as Tables 5 and 6.…”

“…The fact that the findings of this study must be treated as provisional means that there is a need for further research to verify the findings while it is also evident that the development of an Personal Innovativeness scale designed specifically for use in the various specific sectors may well provide results that have higher predictive power than the Ettlie and O'Keefe's (1982) …”

“…In the first instance, it is intuitively appealing to appoint managers with relatively high levels of Personal Innovativeness to roles where they will be expected to innovate and that with some minor grammatical changes to contextualise and update it the Ettlie and O'Keefe's (1982) Innovativeness Scale remains a valid measure of Personal Innovativeness that may be usefully employed as a diagnostic tool in the recruitment process for managers. It would also appear that the Ettlie and O'Keefe (1982) Innovativeness Scale, and especially the data arising from its application, can be used to inform the education and training of managers. The fact that in the contemporary work situation Personal Innovativeness has five key dimensions relating to Leadership, Team, Communication, Risk, and Reward will allow managers to focus their attention and efforts and look to develop these attributes in their employees in order to facilitate innovation.…”

“…It is apparent that some of the scales have sought to measure Personal Innovativeness as a generic construct (eg Ettlie and O'Keefe, 1982;Goldsmith, 1991;Hurt et al, 1977;Kirton, 1976;Kocak and Onen, 2012;Pallister and Foxall, 1998) while others have sought to measure Personal Innovativeness as a domain specific construct. These specific domains include entrepreneurship (Gibson andGibson, 2011), personality (Jackson, 1976), propensity to change (Hage and Dewar, 1973), innovative purchasing behaviour (Leavitt and Walton, 1975), consumer innovativeness and decision making (Goldsmith and Hofacker, 1991;Goldsmith et al, 1995;Ostlund, 1974), mobile commerce (Kourouthanassis et al, 2014;Lu, 2014;Roca et al, 2010;Thakur and Srivastava, 2015), exploratory behaviour (Baumgartner and Steenkamp, 1996;Raju, 1980), consumers eco-innovation (Jansson, 2011), internet banking (Gounaris and Koritos, 2008;Hidayanto et al, 2015), Information Technology (Agarwal and Prasad, 1998;Jackson et al, 2013;Tan and Sie, 2015;Yi et al, 2006), virtual reality simulations (Fagan et al, 2012), webcasting adoption (Lin, 2006), employee level (Hormiga et al, 2013), social media marketing (Pentina et al, 2014), and mobile learning (Cheng, 2014).…”

“…According to Ettlie and O'Keefe (1982) there is "widespread evidence" of a relationship between an individual's attitudes or values and their innovative behaviour. Indeed, as Rothwell (1994, p2) states "..at the very heart of the successful innovation process were 'key individuals'… with a strong commitment to innovation".…”