تاثیر عوامل محیطی و سازمانی بر پذیرش نوآوری: پیامدهای برای عملکرد در سازمان های بخش دولتی

Although technical and administrative innovations have received much academic interest in recent years, our understanding of why some organizations adopt these innovations and others do not is still underdeveloped. This paper examines organizational and environmental factors that may explain the adoption of innovations in public sector organizations. Furthermore, how technical and administrative innovations affect firm performance is also examined. Regarding organizational factors, we analyze strategy and firm size. Regarding environmental factors, we analyze the effect of uncertainty and market concentration. Hypotheses are developed and tested using a combination of archival and survey data from the public healthcare sector. Our results suggest that environmental and organizational factors have inconsistent effects on the adoption of administrative and technical innovations in public sector organizations. Our findings also show that high adopters of both types of innovations are more sensitive to environmental factors than organizational factors. Furthermore, our paper shows that organizations that combine technical and administrative innovations increase their performance.

As organizations across public and private sectors face an increasingly competitive and dynamic environment, there is more pressure to gain competitive advantage through innovations, which are allegedly better able to improve organizational performance (Hernández et al., 2008). In the public sector, the changing environment has spurred organizations into delivering greater flexibility and quality of services, while they cut the cost at the same time. Public authorities are encouraging organizations to adopt new techniques and systems in order to deliver services on high quality and low cost (Meneu et al., 2005). However, there is evidence that the adoption of innovations varies widely across firms and that many organizations do not adopt innovative techniques despite their apparent benefit (Danneels, 2002; Santos and Alvarez-Gonzalez, 2007). Especially within the public sector, where adoption of innovations tends to be slow and fragmentary (Fagerberg et al., 2005). Studies identifying factors that determine organizations’ need for and ability of these innovations in firms are limited and consequently our understanding of why some organizations adopt innovative techniques and others do not is incomplete (Yu and Tao, 2009; Eriksson and Nilsson, 2007). Researchers on innovation have extensively focused on a single type of innovation, but little is known whether different variables may have different explanatory role depending on the type of innovation adopted, such as technical and administrative innovations (Armbruster et al., 2008; Damanpour and Gopalakrishnan, 2001). The adoption of technical and administrative innovations is a function of both organizations’ need for these new techniques and their ability to recognize this need (Fagerberg et al., 2005; Gopalakrishnan and Damanpour, 1997). Building on contingency theory (Drejer, 2002), this study examines the combined effects of environmental and organizational factors on the adoption of innovations and its subsequent effect on performance (Kimberly and Evanisko, 1981; Löfsten and Lindelöf, 2005). This study helps increase our understanding of innovations in organizations by examining different factors associated with the adoption of technical and administrative innovations, and demonstrates that the implementation of these types of innovations is associated with improved performance. In this vein, we answer a recent plea in the innovation literature for more complete explanations of the origins and consequences of different types of innovation in a single study (see Fagerberg et al., 2005). In this paper, we examine organizational and environmental factors using a combination of survey and archival data. The organizational factors examined include strategy and firm size. The environmental factors we examined include uncertainty and market concentration. We conduct our study in the public hospital sector in Spain, where health care authorities are encouraging hospitals’ management to adopt innovative techniques in order to increase performance (Naranjo-Gil and Hartmann, 2007). In the public sector, the new public management paradigm serves as a common heading of different initiatives that many organizations have taken towards delivering greater flexibility and effectiveness under a high deregulation and competition (Kaul, 1997). We use survey data collected from the CEOs of all public hospitals in Spain, for which we obtained a satisfactory response rate of 51.37% with 112 useful questionnaires received out of 218 CEOs. Our results showed that organizational and environmental factors had inconsistent effects on the adoption of technical and administrative innovations. High adopters of both types of innovations were more sensitive to environmental factors than organizational factors. Our results also showed that organizations that combined technical and administrative innovations increased their performance. This research provides evidence on the contingency factors affecting the adoption of technical and administrative innovations, and documents a specific relationship between organizational performance and technical and administrative innovations in public sector organizations. Furthermore, this study provides general support for the contingency fit in organizations, by showing that both types of innovations must fit well with each other to facilitate organizations perform optimally. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces the contingency variables salient to innovation adoption and develops our hypotheses. Section 3 describes the research method used. Section 4 presents the results. Finally, Section 5 discusses the conclusions and limitations of this study.

Drazin and Schoonhoven (1996) noted in their critique of recent innovation studies that many had not attempted to differentiate the various types of innovation. The objective of this study was to provide evidence on the effect of different organizational and environmental variables on innovations, and to subsequently analyze the effect of technical and administrative innovations on performance in public sector organizations. In a more dynamic and competitive environment all over the world, scholars, practitioners and governmental authorities proclaim that organizations require new tools and techniques in order to enhance their efficiency and productivity. Whether or not organizations are capable of substantially facilitating or inhibiting innovation is a matter of controversy (Fagerberg et al., 2005). Furthermore, researchers on the topic of innovation have noted that changing any traditionally risk-adverse organization as public hospitals are, to one of proactive innovation first requires a better understanding of the underlying variables associated with innovation (Gopalakrishnan and Damanpour, 1997; Santos and Alvarez-Gonzalez, 2007). The current study adds to the awareness of how internal and external factors are associated with innovations in public sector organizations. The results of this study extent the literature by providing evidence that our understanding of innovation can be increased by simultaneously investigating factors that provide organizations with an incentive for innovation and variables that determine organizations’ ability to change (Tödtling et al., 2009). Clarifying the relationship between various internal and external factors and different types of innovations adds to the understanding of how and what innovations occur. The empirical results have shown that high adopters of technical and administrative innovations were more sensitive to environmental factors than to organizational factors. The results also provide evidence that environmental and organizational factors had inconsistent effects on the adoption of administrative and technical innovations. In this vein, this paper shows evidence that organizational factors do not affect administrative and technical innovation in a similar way (Wolfe, 1994). This can suggest an indirect effect rather than a direct of environmental factors on administrative innovations. In this vein, Damanpour et al. (1989) argued that the adoption of different types of innovation affect performance to the degree that it would facilitate the environment adaptation of the organization. That is, firms would adjust the adoption of administrative or technical innovation in accordance with the dominant innovation issue in a given time period (Damanpour et al., 1989; Wolfe, 1994). Regarding the effect of technical and administrative innovations on organizational performance, the results show that organizations that combine technical and administrative innovations increased their performance. These findings are in line with Santos and Alvarez-Gonzalez (2007) and Damanpour et al. (1989) who argued that a balanced rate of adoption of administrative and technical innovations is more effective in helping organizations to maintain or improve their level of performance than either administrative or technical innovations alone. Our results suggest that hospitals consider tailoring organizational–environmental factors to encourage the types of innovation that will support and facilitate their organizational goals and objectives. This paper has also showed that public sector organizations with high rate of both technical and administrative innovations achieve better performance. These results are in line with Damanpour and Gopalakrishnan (2001) who found that high-performance banks adopt product and process innovations more evenly than low-performance banks. Our results highlight the convenience of investigating the alignment between the external and internal determinants of innovation in business. These joint analyses of innovation should be preferably conducted with the same sample to allow more reliable comparisons. As with any empirical study, this paper has its limitations. Some limitations are inherent to the survey method, such as the use of perceptual measures. Limitations may also be found in the lack of testing of the directions of causality due to the cross-section nature of the study and the paper focused on one industry. Although we believe that the hospital sector is well suited to test our hypotheses, it may contain idiosyncrasies that have been overlooked. Clearly, empirical testing of the hypotheses in a different industrial setting may add insight into the external validity of the results. In this vein, the comparison of public sector organizations with private companies could be a future line of research. Another limitation of this paper is its focus on a limited number of techniques, which were intended to serve as indicators of broader constructs such as administrative and technical innovations. Other techniques may influence in those constructs as well. This paper has explored the antecedents and consequences of innovations, thus we answer a recent plea in the innovation literature for more complex explanations of the adoption of technical and administrative innovations in organizations (Santos and Alvarez-Gonzalez, 2007; Damanpour and Gopalakrishnan, 2001). The findings of this study have also some practical implications. Through recognizing the importance and usefulness of innovations that affect not only the technical system but also the social system of the organization, executives are advised to formulate the structural and human resource strategies along with the technical strategies. These strategies should also be in accordance with the changes in the respective environment (Damanpour et al., 1989). Thus, managers who want to encourage the introduction of innovation to improve organizational effectiveness need to recognize situational factors of development of both administrative and technical innovations. Some of these situational factors that managers of innovation need to consider are the environment and the market concentration. The findings regarding size have also important implications for public policies that support innovation adoption. Traditionally, government policies have focused support for innovation implementation on small size organizations since they are supposed to have more problems in order to access these technologies. The results obtained in this paper recommend a review of this policy. Finally, the findings of this paper provide a fruitful avenue for improving our understanding of performance in hospitals and other public sector organizations. Public authorities have to find a balance in the adoption of technical and administrative innovations to prevent organizations from performing optimally