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The following questionnaire is designed to measure attitudes toward risk as an element of the decision process in the adoption of ITs.

Attitudes toward risk
Which do you favour?
1. Low-risk projects (with a guaranteed but moderate return on investment)	1 — 2 — 3 — 4 — 5 — 6 — 7	High-risk projects (with the chance of a high return on investment)
2. Gradual and moderate reactions to outside changes	1 — 2 — 3 — 4 — 5 — 6 — 7	Aggressive and far-reaching reactions to outside changes
Which do you prefer?
1. To introduce changes after competitors	1 — 2 — 3 — 4 — 5 — 6 — 7	To introduce changes before competitors
2. Time-tested methods	1 — 2 — 3 — 4 — 5 — 6 — 7	Innovation

Top-down–bottom-up decision-making process

A firm can be said to have a top-down decision-making process if the relative importance of the chief executive officer's (CEO's) influence (on both initiating and adopting IT applications) is much stronger than the relative importance of functional groups' influence (research and development, marketing, production, accounting–finance, and IT groups). Depending on the group of firms, the CEO's influence should be greater than the average sum of all influences from functional groups plus 1, 2, or 3 standard deviations.

A firm has a bottom-up decision-making process if the CEO's influence is not greater than that of the functional group.

Document(s) 12 of 17