The Nonlinear Influence of Harmonious Information Technology Affordance on Organizational Innovation

In this study, we investigate the nature of the influence of organizational information technology (IT) on innovation. To examine this relationship, we leverage a fundamental construct: harmonious IT affordance (HITA). HITA is defined as the degree of coalignment between three salient organizational IT affordances, each of which allows an organization to carry out its most fundamental functions using IT — collaboration, maintenance of organizational memory, and management of organizational processes. We theorize that HITA has a quadratic (U-shaped) effect on innovation. Our theory proposes that when IT affordances increasingly co-align (reflected by increasing HITA), the organization enters a synergistic, virtuous phase that encourages innovation. Counterintuitively, the increasing misalignment of IT affordances can also result in organizational innovation via creative dissonance, which enables organizations to look for opportunities in the presence of misalignment and leverage it to create a synergistic virtuous cycle. We conducted two empirical studies — one with high-level IT executives knowledgeable about innovation and one with sales and business development executives (who market innovations) knowledgeable about IT — that corroborate our theory. Crucially, if the IT affordances are unrelated (low coalignment, where HITA is close to zero), then innovation does not take place. We thus surmise that the relation between HITA and innovation is quadratic.