| The "Factory of the Future," with computer-based information-intensive advanced manufacturing technologies (AMT) has been increasingly prescribed as a potential solution to prevent the decline of the U.S. as a world leader in manufacturing. A number of factors--environmental, structural, technological, individual, and task-related--in a firm's operating environment can facilitate or inhibit the adoption, implementation and successful management of these manufacturing innovations.;Synthesizing the research in three major domains--Information Systems implementation, Organizational Innovation, and Strategic Adaptation--this dissertation (1) proposes a four stage innovation adoption-diffusion model; and (2) empirically validates a major portion of the model by examining the influences of the organization's external environment, internal environment and technological factors on the initiation and adoption of these technological innovations.;Building on past research, this study identifies twelve factors--the perceived dynamism, complexity and hostility of the external environment, centralization, formalization, organizational complexity, organizational past attitude and organizational slack, compatibility, complexity, costs and the relative advantage of the AMT as important determinants of the organizational innovative process and examined their effects. It uses in "approximately longitudinal" (retrospective collection of time series type data) research design consisting of field survey for data gathering from firms in a number of industries using a structured, mailed questionnaire.;Through bivariate correlational and multivariate regression analyses, the results demonstrated that while all the external and internal environmental and technological factors exerted significant influences, only environmental complexity and hostility, the organizations' surplus resources and the relative advantage possessed by the AMT innovations emerged as significant predictors of the motivating forces at the initiation phase and the formation of favorable attitudes at the adoption phase. The quality of the strategic planning process practiced by the firms turned out to be a 'pure' moderator of the linkage between initiation and adoption phases. While there was empirical support for the moderating influences of structural overlays, these had no direct linkage to organizational complexity. There was also much less support for the predictability of the degree of satisfaction with the performance attributes of the innovation (and ultimately effective organizational performance) through the strength of initiation-adoption linkage. Path analysis among the latent constructs and structural modeling through LISREL provided further support to the overall research model; however, many of the theoretically-derived constructs emerged as relatively unimportant. The results seem to argue in favor of a more parsimonious model of the organizational decision process for the adoption of information-intensive AMT innovations. |
