Organizational Inertia as Barrier to Firms’ IT Adoption – Multidimensional Scale Development and Validation

Despite much research on organizational factors affecting firms’ IT adoption and use, little attention has been paid to organizations’ stickiness to current processes although there were better IT innovations or incentives to switch. Against this backdrop, this research-in-progress paper explicitly conceptualizes and operationalizes organizational level inertia based on a rigorous scale development approach to understand the inertial IS usage of organizations. Building on the extant management and information systems literature and preliminary research in practice, we first define a set of fundamental characteristics of inertia manifested in inert organizations. For each of the identified five sub-dimensions spanning cognitive, behavioral, socio-cognitive, economic and political aspects an appropriate measurement model is developed. Second, we pretest the validity and reliability of the proposed measurement instrument using sample data of 146 small and medium-sized enterprises that continue using paper-based instead of electronic invoices and discuss potential model refinements to encounter problematic indicators and subdimensions.