Technology Adoption by Groups: A Test of Twin Predictions based on Social Structure and Technological Characteristics

While the study of technology adoption by individuals and organizations has received considerable attention from researchers in the information systems discipline, little is known about how groups (an important social entity within organizations) adopt technologies. Drawing on past research in groups and technology adoption, this study proposes an “additive model” of technology adoption by groups, surrounding the “twin predictions” of the key social and technological factors. Specifically, the study examines the effect of the group’s social structure (e.g., influence of the majority and the high-status member), and the features of the technology (e.g., the technology’s complexity, transferability, and group supportability), on the group’s adoption of the technology. Further, the model also outlines the effect of the group’s adoption of the technology on the group’s performance. A laboratory experiment, where groups were given the choice of selecting one of two different technologies for performing a flowcharting task was conducted to test the model. Even though the empirical examination highlights the dominant effect of the technology characteristics, the study illustrates that this dominance is not an indication of the support of the “technological imperative” perspective, but is actually a testimony to the fact that “technology characteristics” is in fact a sociotechnical construct