Institutional Influences in Individual-level Innovation Adoption outside Organizational Contexts: A Scale Development Study

There has recently been a growing interest in IS innovation research regarding how institutional influences affect organizations’ adoption decisions under the label “organizational institutionalism”. However, there has been a lack of research regarding institutional influences on individual adopters in non-organizational adoption settings, although institutional theory's foundations apply to decisions made by actors in general. In our paper, we expand the use of institutional theory to also include the impact on individuals in non-organizational settings. We develop three constructs comprising “institutional influences on individual-level innovation adoption” normative, cultural-cognitive, and regulative influences in a non-organizational setting, and rigorously validate them through a state-of-the-art procedure. Subsequently, we empirically test the measurement model’s fit and the constructs’ validity and reliability through a web-based survey. We find that institutional individual-level influences' impact on behavioral intention is mediated through performance expectations, which is in contrast with their direct impact on intention in organizational settings.