What's the weather like? The effect of team climate and individual attributes on individual intention to explore a new technology

Research on technology adoption and use has come along way in explaining the factors driving individuals' use of new technologies. However, recognizing the inherently nested structure of social systems, recent research has pointed to the need to understand new technology use from a multilevel perspective. This need is coupled with a desire to understand the factors that drive individuals' utilization of the full range of features provided by the new technology. Drawing on the individual attributes and team climate literature, we develop a multilevel model predicting individual intention to explore a new technology. We test our model in the context of 410 individuals in 69 organizational work teams using a newly introduced VoIP system. Our results show that competitive climate has a positive influence on individual intention to explore. Moreover we also find that individual attributes not only significantly affect the individual intention to explore a new technology, but such attributes also place an important role in influencing the efficacy of competitive climate. In particular we find that older individuals and women exhibit a lower willingness to explore, and that team competitive climate serves as a catalyst for increasing women's willingness to explore a new technology.