Technology Adoption by Groups: A Valence Perspective

While past research has contributed to an understanding of how organizations or individuals adopt technologies, little is known about how such adoption occurs in groups. Given the widespread acknowledgment that organizations are moving to group-based structures and that groups often utilize technologies for performing their tasks, it is critical that we understand how such collective social entities adopt technologies. Such an understanding can better guide investment and implementation decisions. In this paper, we draw on existing literature about groups, technology characteristics, and valence to conceptualize a model of technology adoption by groups (referred to as the TAG model). We view the TAG phenomenon as a process of communication and negotiation in which analytically distinct factors-such as the individual members’ a priori attitudes toward the technology, the majority subgroup’s opinion, high-status members’ opinions, substantive conflict, and relevant characteristics of the technology play an important role. We develop several theoretical propositions regarding the nature of the contribution of these factors toward an adoption decision and discuss measurement tradeoffs and guidelines.