The Role of Aggregation in the Measurement of It–Related Organizational Innovation1
Authors: Fichman, Robert G.
Journal: MIS Quarterly (2001)
DOI: 10.2307/3250990
<jats:p>The extent of organizational innovation with information technology, an important construct in the IT innovation literature, has been measured in many different ways. Some measures have a narrow focus while others aggregate innovative behaviors across a set of innovations or stages in the assimilation lifecycle. There appear to be some significant tradeoffs involving aggregation: more aggregated measures can be more robust and generalizable and can promote stronger predictive validity, while less aggregated measures allow more context-specific investigations and can preserve clearer theoretical interpretations. This article begins with a conceptual analysis that identifies the circumstances when these tradeoffs are most likely to favor aggregated measures. It is found that aggregation should be favorable when: (1) the researcher's interest is in general innovation or a model that generalizes to a class of innovations, (2) antecedents have effects in the same direction in all assimilation stages, (3) characteristics of organizations can be treated as constant across the innovations in the study, (4) characteristics of innovations can not be treated as constant across organi…