Organizational Innovation and Performance: The Problem of "Organizational Lag"

Abstract

Fariborz Damanpour and William M. Evan The organizational lag model, which postulates that a discrepancy exists between the rates of adoption of technical and administrative innovations, is applied to study the -impact of adoption of types of innovation on organizational performance. Four hypotheses were derived from this -model and were tested in a sample of 85 public libraries. It was found that: (1) libraries adopt technical innovations at a faster rate than administrative innovations; (2) administrative and technical innovations have a higher correlation in high-performance organizations than in low-performance organizations; (3) the degree of organizational lag is inversely related to organizational performance; and (4) the adoption of administrative innovations tends to triggerthe adoption of technical innovations more readily than the reverse.,