The influence of resistance to change on evaluating an innovation project's innovativeness and risk: A sensemaking perspective

Extant research indicates that different individuals struggle to achieve a shared understanding on innovation projects, the primary focus has only been on the individuals' functional background as a cause of systematic differences in assessing innovativeness, neglecting dispositional traits. To address this research opportunity, we investigate how a decision's context and an individual's resistance to change influence the assessment of an innovation project's risk and innovativeness. Our research applies a sensemaking perspective to an experimental design involving 455 participants. We show that an individual's resistance to change moderates the positive relationship between an innovation project's innovativeness and its perceived risk. This moderation effect's strength and direction depends on the underlying interpretation of an organization's context: An opportunity is associated with negative moderation that reduces perceivable risks, while the context of a threat is associated with a positive moderation that reinforces the perception of risks.