What about Passive Innovation Resistance? Investigating Adoption‐Related Behavior from a Resistance Perspective

Abstract

Adoption literature has been dominated by a novelty‐seeking paradigm, whereas resistance to innovation has received considerably less attention as a means to explain and predict adoption‐related behavior. The lack of a good metric to assess consumers' predisposition to resist innovations has prevented the establishment of a common ground for empirical research and thus hampered progress to date. This paper develops and empirically validates a scale to measure individual differences in consumers' predisposition to resist innovations (hereafter, passive innovation resistance, or PIR). The proposed instrument entails a personality‐specific and situation‐specific measure that assesses individual differences in consumers' predisposition to resist innovations, emerging from their inclination to resist changes and exhibit status quo satisfaction. The scale represents a measure of the generic tendency to resist innovations and thus captures the notion of a general disposition to act in a consistent way in various situations. The results of multiple studies show that the PIR scale has good psychometric properties, and its relationships with other constructs conform to theoretical expectations. Furthermore, the PIR scale explains and predicts adoption‐related behaviors beyond the variance accounted for by traditionally investigated constructs such as innate innovativeness, big‐five personality dimensions, or demographic variables. These results clearly reveal the importance of PIR for determining adoption‐related behavior but contest a conceptualization of constructs that tap only novelty seeking at a high level as the direct antecedent of adoption. Research that attempts to explain and predict adoption‐related behavior can benefit from taking a resistance perspective as well.