Employees' Acceptance of Health Care Service Innovations: A Study in the Field of Tele-audiology

The successful development and implementation of service innovations in health care is closely related to the acceptance of health care professionals. However, creating acceptance among frontline employees is challenging. Today, service innovations contain disruptive new technological solutions and digital service components. Beyond that, service innovations are increasingly driven by market entrants from outside the health care industry, which employees tend to perceive as a threat for their own professional future. Following the mechanisms of threat-rigidity thesis and explanatory approaches of sensemaking literature, we argue that the acceptance of frontline employees in times of perceived threats decreases for (1) more disruptive service innovations and (2) external driven service innovations. The study pays special attention to the moderating role of organizational support to weaken the negative effects of (1) disruptiveness of innovations through a greater information exchange between employees and (2) external driven innovations through higher perceived entrepreneurial orientation. With a quantitative vignette study, we surveyed 527 health care professionals in the field of audiology. Linear regression analysis and follow-up analysis of interaction effects confirmed three of four hypotheses. The disruptiveness has a significant negative effect on employees' service innovation acceptance, while the source of innovation remains insignificant. In addition, the results indicate that the two outlined approaches of organizational support show significant interactions.