NOTA 4. ADMINISTRACIÓN Y GESTIÓN DE RIESGOS
A. RIESGO DE MERCADO
Besides the role of a stakeholder, there are two identifiable extremes on the scale of acceptance; either cooperate and accept or threat and oppose or resist the issue at hand. As Hartwick and Barki (1994) argue, participation is a key factor for the success of the development of a system and the subsequent satisfaction of the users. For this reason, we aim to investigate the level of participation of a stakeholder as being of influence on the innovation adoption outcome. (Hartwick & Barki, 1994).
From the domain of organisational development, Passmore & Fagans introduce a participation theory that characterizes the different levels of participation and success factors for effective participation (Pasmore & Fagans, 1992).
In this model, not conforming to an innovation is not seen as a level of participation, while in fact, regarding the ordinal composition of the model, this should be a level before the conforming level (i.e. Level 0). As is argued by the authors of this model, the higher the level of participation, the higher the estimated success of innovation deployment. The level of participation in turn is dependent on a stakeholder’s coping tactic, its formal and informal role and intentions. The levels of participation of a stakeholder can be evaluated in relation to the perceptions of the stakeholder with respect to the innovation, as discussed earlier. For example, when a collaborating stakeholder has poor outcome expectations, the
Passmore & fagans (1992) levels of participation
Definition
Conforming Simply joining and participating
Contributing Helping to improve the system
Challenging Attempting to change the system while retaining
the existing structure and distribution of power
Collaborating Seeking to involve or support others who share
the agenda of changing the system while retaining its essential characteristics
Creating Designing the system itself or even transcending
the system to create a more hospitable environment for the system to inhabit
concluding remarks with respect to usability for our framework
We use the term potential resistance for a reason. First of all, we did not include all validated constructs influencing acceptance behavior (as we have seen in the technology acceptance models), but only two with high predictory power. There are however more factors influencing a stakeholder’s acceptance. Furthermore, as stated earlier, a stakeholder’s intention is only partly related to actual resistance of the innovation after implementation. We only use the term potential resistance as an indicator for attention. Also note that we only discuss how a stakeholder matters here. We do not compensate for the capacity of a stakeholder. In other words, even though a designer is not participating and does have poor performance expectations, the stakeholder might have low salience, indicating that he might not even matter in terms of influence on the innovation implementation outcomes. For that reason, we state that a stakeholder’s participation level in combination with outcome expectations can indicate the potential resistance encountered to achieve the intended goals, what can indicate a possible risk of unfavorable outcome for the innovation implementation. With unfavorable we refer to low goal fidelity, as discussed earlier. In terms of the capacity constructs; unfavorable capacity direction.
So, the set of role typologies in combination with a stakeholders’ level of participation, can be visualized as follows;
figure 9: The interaction between innovation perceptions, role and level of participation
of a stakeholder. Role Level of participation Perceptions of innovation (technology acceptance constructs)
The roles of involvement (over the course of the innovation journey) can be considered a direct way of coping with dynamics in the stakeholder environment (Vos & Achterkamp, 2006). It may reveal that in a certain point of time the salient stakeholder community or DMU lacks accepter involvement or that salient stakeholders are merely conforming to the innovation, instead or actually contributing to it.
Remember the stakeholder capacity attribute of proximity, or degree of closeness to the project. The relation between proximity and participation level might be found in terms of a stakeholder’s eligibility for participation. Stakeholder’s close to the project but with no participation might be involved more.
One must note however, that the capacity of a stakeholder may have an influence on the intention of a stakeholder (as can also be seen in the individual technology acceptance models as described earlier). Together, the constructs of level of participation and role involvement may indicate the potential influence a stakeholder potentially exerts in shaping the innovation.
In this paragraph we discussed theory with respect to levels of participation of stakeholders. This level of participation model is helpful in evaluating a stakeholder’s contribution towards the project or in our case, IT-based innovation. When high power, decisional stakeholders fail to contribute it may be wise to investigate why this is the case since they potentially can endanger the project. At the same time, the level of participation of a stakeholder as evaluative dimension, may provide insights in the effect of certain interventions aimed at commitment, acceptance and involvement of stakeholders. As was shown by Hartwick and Barki (1994), participation is a key factor for the success of the development of a system and the subsequent satisfaction of the users. (Hartwick & Barki, 1994)
One must note that role typologies are correlated with capacity attributes as described earlier. A decisional role may affect a stakeholder’s influence, but it may also decrease it. These interactions are complex and hard to measure and are not in scope in the light of our problem statement. They are present however. The same holds for the level of participation of a stakeholder. Also, one must be careful to draw conclusions about a stakeholder’s perception of the innovation based on the participation level. Conforming to an innovation does not necessarily mean that a stakeholder is not enthusiastic about the innovation itself. The conforming participation level may be caused by lack of time, low proximity or low urgency. For that reason, we included specific technology acceptance attributes to our model.
The combination of both capacity dimensions and intention dimensions in one integrated model of stakeholder classification is not found in literature. The ‘direction of capacity’ can be better understood by evaluating a stakeholder’s level of participation in relation to its functional role with respect to the innovation. In this way our theoretical synthesis, as will be further described in the next paragraph, is unique.