The influence of software developers’ creative style on their attitudes to and assimilation of a software process innovation Michael J. Gallivan * Computer Information Systems Department, Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University, P.O. Box 4015, Atlanta, GA 30302, USA Received 5 December 2001; received in revised form 13 March 2002; accepted 20 March 2002 Abstract This study examines outcomes associated with differences in software developers’ creative style, based on Kirton’s adaption– innovation theory. Propositions were developed and tested to identify the relationship between software developers’ creativity and their attitude to a technological innovation that altered the software development process in their organizations. Based on adaption–innovation theory, we expected that innovators (i.e. more innovative employees) would demonstrate higher levels of job satisfaction and performance than adaptors (i.e. less innovative employees), after approximately 4 months of using the innovation. We conducted a survey of 220 developers in two firms that had recently replaced mainframe-based software development with client/server development. Our results demonstrate a pattern of relationships among employees’ creative style, attitude to the innovation, job satisfaction, and performance which we believe have important implications for managers responsible for implementing other technological innovations. # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Creativity; Innovativeness; Implementation; Mandatory adoption; IS professionals 1. Introduction Understanding the factors that influence the suc- cessful adoption of technological innovations has been a long-standing concern for both IS researchers and practitioners. For over 25 years, researchers have sought to understand the factors and processes that lead to successful implementation of new technolo- gies [39,58,65,68,69,82,87]. One rich stream of research has investigated the factors that influence technology acceptance for voluntary individual-level innovations [1,8,25,26,70,98,105], i.e. where users independently decide to adopt an innovation and do not need to coordinate their adoption with other adopters. IS researchers have recognized, however, that for some adoption scenarios, adoption is neither voluntary [85], nor independent of other users [30]. Understanding the factors that influence implemen- tation outcomes when adoption is involuntary and occurs within a network of other interdependent adopters is just as critical as understanding voluntary adoption scenarios, although the more complex sce- nario has received much less attention from IS researchers [37]. Information & Management 40 (2003) 443–465 * Corresponding author. Present address: Tel.: þ1-404-651-3773; fax: þ1-404-651-3842. E-mail address: mgallivan@gsu.edu (M.J. Gallivan). 0378-7206/02/$ – see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII:S0378-7206(02)00039-3