Date of Award
1985
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Abstract
Telemarketing is an increasingly popular innovation in industrial salesforces in North America. In spite of rising popularity, the incidence of problems severe enough to cause discontinuance has been estimated at about 40%. The purpose of this study was to formulate and test a model of organizational factors leading to successful adoption of the telemarketing innovation. Data to test the model were collected by interviewing two key informants in each of 110 industrial salesforces that had adopted telemarketing in the recent past. Structural equation modeling as implemented by LISREL was used to test the fit of the model to the data and to test the hypotheses developed from the model.;The overall model was a moderately good fit and support was found for many of the individual hypotheses in the model. To summarize, organization centralization was positively associated with success; formalization was negatively related to success. Resolution of implementation issues, sales rep support of telemarketing and core use of telemarketing were all positively associated with success. Division of labor, differentiation, and management support of telemarketing were positively related to resolution of implementation issues; sales rep support of innovation and innovation compatibility were both positively related to sales rep support of telemarketing. Sales management support of innovation was positively related to management support of telemarketing.;Because the causal model was tested on cross-sectional data, the findings must be viewed as tentative at this point. However, preliminary conclusions were drawn for theory and marketing management. The study contributes to innovation theory by specifically modeling variables in the post-adoption phase of organization innovation adoption. Because the model is specifically formulated for the sales organization setting, it also contributes to sales management theory--especially the growing body of theory on marketing organization structure. The major theoretical contribution is the successful modeling of interrelationships among constructs that had been previously found to relate to innovation on individual bases.;Given the relatively high proportion of variance in adoption success explained by the model (.44), useful conclusions and implications for marketing managers were also drawn. In conclusion, the model provides a good start for needed future work on post-innovation adoption in organizations.
Recommended Citation
Marshall, Judith Joy, "Innovation Adoption In Industrial Sales Organizations: A Field Study Of The Post-adoption Phase In The Case Of Telemarketing" (1985). Digitized Theses. 1435.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/digitizedtheses/1435