Resistance to Innovation

Its Sources and Manifestations

Shaul Oreg,Jacob Goldenberg

• Editore: University of Chicago Press
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226237329
• Argomento: Business
• Categoria: Business General

Every year, about 25, 000 new products are introduced in the United States. Most of these products fail—at considerable expense to the companies that produce them. Such failures are typically thought to result from consumers' resistance to innovation, but marketers have tended to focus instead on consumers who show little resistance, despite these "early adopters" comprising only 20 percent of the consumer population.Shaul Oreg and Jacob Goldenberg bring the insights of marketing and organizational behavior to bear on the attitudes and behaviors of the remaining 80 percent who resist innovation. The authors identify two competing definitions of resistance: In marketing, resistance denotes a reluctance to adopt a worthy new product, or one that offers a clear benefit and carries little or no risk. In the field of organizational behavior, employees are defined as resistant if they are unwilling to implement changes regardless of the reasons behind their reluctance. Seeking to clarify the act of rejecting a new product from the reasons—rational or not—consumers may have for doing so, Oreg and Goldenberg propose a more coherent definition of resistance less encumbered by subjective, context-specific factors and personality traits. The application of this tighter definition makes it possible to disentangle resistance from its sources and ultimately offers a richer understanding of consumers' underlying motivations. This important research is made clear through the use of many real-life examples.

PART I

Sources of Resistance

CHAPTER ONE

It’s Not the Innovation, It’s the Adopter

Why Some People Are More Likely Than Others to Resist

Individuals’ unreasonable commitment to archaic practices is not uncommon. Let us describe a personal experience from the perspective of the first author (S. O.): Until a few years ago, a dear colleague would still do his work using a 1999 computer with an Intel 80486 microprocessor (a.k.a. the i486, which was the predecessor of the Pentium I chip). He used a fourteen-inch tube monitor, the storage devices on his computer were restricted to floppy disks, and obviously the computer lacked USB ports. As a faculty member in the department, he could have easily asked the IT staff to replace his computer with a newer one, yet he chose not to. He liked his computer. He was used to it, and he believed it comfortably served his needs.

I couldn’t understand how he could get any work done on it. He had to undertake complicated maneuvers to transfer content from his computer to those of others, he couldn’t install newer versions of software, and overall, the computer was extremely slow. I kept trying to convince him that he’d be better off with a new system, but he was not to be convinced. For him, as long as he managed to get his old software to work, he didn’t seem to mind about the rest, even if this required him to acquire peculiar rituals and to restart his computer every so often. It seemed clear that there was something more going on. Rather than lacking the need for a new computer, it was clear that other factors predisposed him to stick so adamantly to his old one. When telling Jacob (my coauthor) this story, Jacob realized that he too has a close colleague, a leading marketing scholar, who exhibits similar behaviors. One of his prime research interests is innovation adoption, yet he is proud to be the last person at his university who has used transparences and an overhead projector, until he was practically forced to switch to PowerPoint presentations. Furthermore, much like the case above, his computer was sufficiently old to be the only one to survive a virus attack that infected all of the computers at his school. He is proud of both stories and exemplifies the strategic (and proud) Laggard.

It is therefore apparent that one reason for resistance lies within the individual. As we discuss in the following chapters, alongside its advantages, the adoption of an innovation typically has drawbacks, with numerous reasons to resist it. At the same time, responses to any given innovation vary widely across individuals. Some people are more inclined than others to resist the mere notion of change. Such a predisposition to resist becomes most apparent at the extremes, once the majority of individuals has already made the transition to the new situation, and stands bewildered when faced with those who insist on holding on to the past.

It was cases such as those presented above that piqued my interest in the internal factors that drive some individuals to resist the mere notion of change. At that time, the literature on individuals’ resistance to change and innovation was not abundant. Most works discussed resistance from a macro perspective, focusing on the behavior of organizations or markets rather than that of individuals (e.g., Hannan and Freeman 1984). There were some works, however, that looked at the adoption of innovation and change as a function of individuals’ personality. Most of these works focused on identifying those who are early to adopt (Innovators) versus those who resist innovations (Laggards). For example, Everett Rogers (1995) proposed that early adopters are empathetic, rational, and well able to cope with uncertainty. David Midgley and Grahame Dowling (1978; 1993) added to these attributes and suggested that Innovators are also relatively high on traits such as achievement seeking and self-monitoring.

Empirical research has been conducted from this perspective and has linked early adoption to traits such as novelty seeking (Manning, Bearden, and Madden 1995); tolerance for ambiguity, low cognitive rigidity, and low dogmatism (Jacoby 1971; Raju 1980); and cognitive innovativeness (Goldsmith, Freiden, and Eastman 1995; Im, Bayus, and Mason 2003; Marcati, Guido, and Peluso 2008; see table 1.1). This research was motivated by the desire to understand the psychological mechanisms that account for early adoption. While we can be relatively certain that Laggards, typically defined as those within the market who are last to adopt an innovation (Rogers 1995), differ in their characteristics from Innovators, who are first to adopt, we still lack a framework that focuses on Lagging. In line with this view, more than twenty years ago Midgley and Dowling (1993) noted: “It is interesting that as a field we believe the rejection of new products to be common, yet there are few studies that directly address this phenomenon. Clearly research on rejection is needed and is likely to have a high payoff in terms of improving our models” (623–24). Although some exceptions exist, as in a study linking consumers’ self-efficacy to resistance to technological innovations (Ellen, Bearden, and Sharma 1991), Midgley and Dowling’s criticism is as relevant today as it was then. It is true for research on Laggards in general and for the dispositional perspective of Laggards in particular. Rather than say what Laggards are not, it would be valuable to say what they are. Trying to explain why some individuals resist change and innovation may yield insights that otherwise escape us when we focus solely on explaining early adoption and the eager pursuit of change. Now this is not to say we cannot infer characteristics of the dispositional Laggard from studies of Innovators, yet as we will describe shortly, several of Laggards’ characteristics are notably more than the mere opposite of the characteristics of Innovators.

Table 1.1 Personality constructs that have been used for predicting early adoption
Construct	Works contributing to the establishment of the construct	Definition
Novelty seeking	(Hirschman 1980; Pearson 1970)	The tendency to approach versus the tendency to avoid novel experiences.
Tolerance for ambiguity	(Budner 1962; Frenkel-Brunswik 1948)	The degree to which an individual perceives ambiguous stimuli as desirable, challenging, and interesting, without ignoring or avoiding their complexity.
Cognitive rigidity	(Pally 1955; Werner 1946)	Stiffness, of difficulty in responding efficiently and adequately to changing stimuli.
Dogmatism	(Rokeach 1960)	The degree to which a person’s belief system is controlled by the need to defend against ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I: Sources of Resistance
• PART II: Resistance Manifestations
• Epilogue
• Index