Premises for innovation: Italian validation and dimensionality of the inventory of organizational innovativeness (IOI)

Literature underlines the role of the organizational orientation toward innovation as a precursor of its effective capability to generate and adopt innovations, in this way gaining competitive advantages. However less attention has been devoted to the methodological issues concerning how to measure this construct. Indeed, the few existing measures are often one-dimensional and neglect the multiple facets of this construct. In this paper we examine the multidimensional IOI-Inventory of Organizational Innovativeness (Tang, 1999) with the aim of verifying its psychometrics properties, validating it in the Italian context, and exploring the relationships among its dimensions and other related constructs (servant leadership, climate for support to innovation, climate for participative safety) and outcomes (performance and innovation adoption). Results of the confirmatory factor analysis on a sample of 616 Italian employees did not support the theoretical 9-factor structure. The subsequent exploratory factor analysis attested for a 6-factor model in line with the empirical solution emerged in a previous research. Results of the correlations confirmed the relationship of the IOI’s dimensions with both correlated and outcomes measures. Overall, findings of this study attested for the good psychometric properties of the IOI and support that this inventory is a reliable and valid measure of the organizational orientation toward innovation to be used to assess the different facets that contribute to promote the innovation adoption.