The effects of organizational buying behaviour and decision-making on an organization’s propensity to be an early adopter

Previous researchers have tried to explicate early adoption with innate innovativeness, socio-, demo-, and psychographics. However, targeting and communication based on these factors has led to unsatisfactory market launch results for practitioners, whereas scholars have only succeeded to cover a limited extent in explaining early adoption. Therefore, identifying and locating early adopters has remained as a million-dollar question for both – marketers and researchers. Thus, the research objective of this study was to assess, how does the organizational buying behaviour and decision-making style impact an organization’s propensity to be an early adopter. Based on a literature review on diffusion of innovation theories, early adoption, and organizational buying behaviour, an online survey was crafted and dispatched to the managers of Finnish team and individual sports associations, which represented the study’s non-profit organization target sample. Measures utilized in the survey had been established by earlier scholars, whereas they were slightly adapted to improve their fit for the non-profit sample. Out of the 3927 sent survey invitations, 599 responses were successfully completed, yielding the study with a response rate of 15.3%. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted on the data, and it led to the exclusion of some items. Hypotheses were tested with hierarchical multiple linear regression analysis. The findings indicated that organizations’ willingness to cannibalize over the value of their existing procurements and appreciation towards their suppliers’ flexibility – positively predicted their propensity to be early adopters. Additionally, intuitive decision-making style was found to intensify the positive relationship between supplier flexibility and early adoption. The results also showed that organizations with routinized purchasing habits expressed lower propensity to be early adopters, while avoidant decision-making style further accelerated this negative relationship. Overall, the results implied that managers should involve and observe the behaviour of their potential customers during the early phases of their product development, to improve the success in market launches. By introducing a relationship between early adoption and more dynamic factors, which the organizational buying behaviour decision approaches represents, the findings challenged the predominant theory, which has held early adopters as static entities. The study was exposed to common method bias and adaption of items to some extent compromised the reliability of some of the used measures. A similar study should be replicated with separated data collection in another non-profit or firm sample to contribute to the generalizations of findings. In addition, future scholars can develop new measures to advance early adoption research with less emphasis on technology, as it is not the only form of innovations or new products