Social pressures on organizational website adoption

Innovation adoption research has demonstrated that organizational features and perceived benefits of innovations play significant roles in explaining organizational-level decisions to adopt new technologies. Beyond such motiv ations, however, social pressures operating at the interorganizational leve l have been proposed to influence the decision to adopt innovations, even w ithout regard to any proven or anticipated benefit from the innovation itse lf To empirically determine the influence of organizational features, perce ived benefits, and social pressures on organizations' innovation adoption d ecisions, this study examined the decisions of 288 organizations to adopt I nternet websites. Organizational social pressures were found to be the most significant discriminators of adopters and nonadopters, although they were not particularly important in predicting the likelihood of future adoption for those organizations currently without websites. This finding suggests that social pressures are significant in innovation adoption, but that they may have their strongest effect during the early phases of innovation diff usion. Organizational features and perceived benefits were also reasonable discriminators of adopters and nonadopters as well as effective predictors of the likelihood of adoption far nonadopters. To a lesser degree, these fa ctors were also predictive of the stage of adoption for those organizations that have already adopted websites.