Managers’ Disruptive Innovation Activities in Technology Organizations: Analyzing Antecedents and Developing a Measurement Scale

Abstract

Disruptive innovations have received extensive coverage in the scholarship during the past two decades. These innovations usually underperform as per the expectations of the mainstream customers at the time of their introduction. However, they survive via offering an alternate set of features valued by the low-end, niche, or new market segments. Over a period, these innovations improve to the extent that makes them capable of competing with the market leaders, sometimes even outperform them; ultimately, leading to disruption of the existing market networks. Previous work indicates a lack of attention paid towards the managerial agency of disruptive innovation. Although, scholarship has recognized the critical role of managers in influencing the firm's long-term, strategic orientation and survival. Moreover, some of the studies have also signified group-level cognitive antecedents to strategic transformation in dynamic environments. However, less attention has been paid to managers' role, specifically in the middle hierarchical layers, towards promoting disruptive innovations. This knowledge gap is hindering the efforts to identify the stimulants of disruptive innovation within organizational settings. As a result, the challenge remains, how to proactively address the problem of disruptive innovations. Thus, creating a need to develop an empirically validated understanding of disruptive innovation from a managerial perspective. This study is undertaken to enhance understanding and provide insight on disruptive innovation at the individual level of analysis. The present research contributes to the scholarship and practice by first exploring managers' role in fostering disruptive innovations and conceptualizing the construct of manager’s Disruptive Innovation Activities (DIA). Second, by developing a DIA measure and testing its validity and reliability through survey data from 390 managers of three technology firms. Third, by building a preliminary causal network from an internal organizational perspective and developing hypotheses that represent causal links (direct and indirect) between the organizational factors (regarding culture and structure), firm’s customer orientation, manager’s mastery achievement orientation, and his/her DIA. A survey was conducted from 337 managers of five technology firms operating in dynamic environments to test the hypotheses. The study's findings suggested that there is a scope for managers in the middle hierarchical tiers to initiate or exploit the disruptive innovation process. The study findings and their implications for scholarship and practice ix are discussed. Furthermore, the limitations of the study are highlighted along with future research directions.