What’s the weather like? The effect of team climate and individualattributes 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 demographic 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. The multilevel model explains 33% of the variance in intention to explore and 7% of the variance in usage scope. We discuss the implications for theory and practice.