Perceived Organizational Innovativeness Scale (PORGI)

Abstract

The Perceived Organizational Innovativeness Scale (PORGI) is a psychometric instrument developed by H. Thomas Hurt and C. Wayne Teigen in 1977 to evaluate how individual members perceive the innovative capacity, strategic adaptability, and cultural openness of their employing organization. Rooted in organizational communication and diffusion of innovations theory, the instrument conceptualizes innovativeness not merely as an objective tally of patents, capital expenditures, or research-and-development outputs, but as a socially constructed, subjective climate experienced by organizational participants. Comprising 25 items evaluated on a five-point Likert scale, the PORGI captures both proactive institutional behaviors (e.g., industry leadership, creative experimentation, participative communication) and bureaucratic resistance patterns (e.g., operational inertia, skepticism toward novelty, structural rigidity).

Scored through a balanced transformation formula that yields a composite metric ranging from 25 to 125, the PORGI categorizes organizations across Everett M. Rogers’ classic diffusion taxonomy: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards. Psychometric investigations consistently indicate high internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients regularly exceeding .90, alongside robust construct, convergent, and predictive validities. The PORGI has found extensive application across management studies, healthcare administration, educational leadership, and organizational development, serving as a critical diagnostic index for readiness for change, internal communication efficacy, and organizational performance.

Keywords

Perceived Organizational Innovativeness Scale, PORGI, organizational innovativeness, diffusion of innovations, organizational climate, change management, organizational communication, psychometrics, scale validation, employee perceptions

Authors

The Perceived Organizational Innovativeness Scale was conceptualized, developed, and empirically validated by H. Thomas Hurt and C. Wayne Teigen. At the time of the instrument’s inception in 1977, Dr. Hurt was an influential scholar in the field of instructional and organizational communication, working within academic networks that included eminent measurement theorists such as James C. McCroskey at West Virginia University. Dr. Hurt’s scholarship concentrated heavily on the measurement of innovation orientations, interpersonal communication dynamics within educational institutions, and employee willingness to embrace technological and procedural change.

C. Wayne Teigen collaborated closely with Hurt to construct empirical assessment batteries that bridged communication theory and industrial-organizational psychology. Their seminal work introducing the instrument appeared in the landmark publication Communication Yearbook 1, edited by Brent D. Ruben and published under the auspices of the International Communication Association (ICA) by Transaction Books. Archival curation and methodological dissemination of the instrument were subsequently supported by the James C. McCroskey Measurement Library, which has preserved and distributed foundational communication assessment inventories for global non-commercial research.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Perceived Organizational Innovativeness Scale (PORGI) is to systematically measure an employee’s cognitive appraisals and affective perceptions regarding their organization’s orientation toward change, novelty, and proactive adaptation. While macro-level organizational research historically evaluated corporate innovativeness through archival metrics—such as total research and development (R&D) expenditures, frequency of new product launches, or patent counts—these structural indicators frequently fail to capture the internal sociopsychological environment. Employees do not interact with balance sheets or patent registers directly; rather, their daily workplace behavior, motivation, and psychological engagement are governed by the perceived climate within which they operate.

The theoretical rationale underlying the PORGI asserts that an organization cannot effectively implement technological transformations, strategic pivots, or operational modernizations without an internal culture that legitimizes experimentation and tolerates intelligent failure. When employees perceive their organization as rigid, suspicious of novel thinking, or tardy in responding to environmental pressures, their individual willingness to champion new initiatives is substantially dampened. Conversely, organizations perceived as industry pioneers and receptive innovators engender higher levels of employee proactivity, organizational citizenship behaviors, and psychological safety.

In applied organizational diagnostics, the PORGI serves several distinct functions:

• Pre-Transformation Readiness Audits: Administering the scale prior to large-scale enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations, digital transformations, or mergers enables leadership to gauge baseline skepticism and institutional inertia.
• Leadership and Supervisory Evaluation: By analyzing scores across distinct departments or business units, executive teams can identify micro-climates where managerial communication styles actively stifle bottom-up innovation.
• Organizational Research and Benchmarking: In academic and behavioral science research, the scale operates as a pivotal independent, mediating, or moderating variable when modeling relationships between leadership styles (e.g., transformational vs. transactional), employee turnover intentions, communication satisfaction, and competitive market agility.

Psychological Construct

The PORGI quantifies Perceived Organizational Innovativeness, defined as the degree to which an enterprise is characterized by its internal constituents as possessing a forward-looking behavioral disposition, actively generating and integrating novel solutions, and maintaining an open, supportive sociotechnical architecture. This psychological construct is multidimensional in its operational manifestations, capturing both macro-reputational positioning and internal interpersonal dynamics. Rather than reflecting an individual’s personal inclination to innovate—which Hurt, Joseph, and Cook (1977) operationalized separately in their Individual Innovativeness Scale—the PORGI measures an employee’s collective appraisal of the institutional entity.

Key Facets of Perceived Innovativeness

Although scored as a unified composite index, rigorous theoretical deconstruction of the 25 items reveals five foundational facets:

1. Industry Leadership and Pioneer Orientation: Reflected in items assessing whether the organization is perceived as a trailblazer, market benchmark, or trusted authority consulted by peer institutions (e.g., Item 2: “a leader among other organizations”; Item 5: “often consulted by other organizations for advice and information”; Item 9: “considered one of the leaders of its type”). This dimension captures institutional prestige and external boundary-spanning competence.
2. Cultural Openness and Experimentation: Denoting a workplace atmosphere wherein unconventional thinking is celebrated rather than suppressed (e.g., Item 4: “very inventive”; Item 10: “receptive to new ideas”; Item 24: “frequently tries out new ideas”). Organizations scoring high here exhibit strong psychological safety and cognitive flexibility.
3. Procedural Dynamism vs. Bureaucratic Inertia: Representing the temporal velocity and operational agility with which the enterprise updates its methods of execution (e.g., Item 7: “creative in its method of operation”; Item 13: “very original in its operational procedures”; contrasted with Item 14: “does not respond quickly enough to necessary changes” and Item 17: “slow to change”).
4. Communication Transparency and Participative Governance: Recognizing that innovation cannot flourish within information silos, several items assess supervisory feedback loops and employee empowerment (e.g., Item 18: “rarely involves employees in the decision-making process”; Item 19: “maintains good communication between supervisors and employees”; Item 23: “never satisfactorily explains to employees the reasons for procedural changes”).
5. Institutional Cynicism and Dogmatism: Capturing entrenched cognitive conservatism and defensive routines that prioritize historical precedent over current efficacy (e.g., Item 3: “suspicious of new ways of thinking”; Item 6: “skeptical of new ideas”; Item 12: “follows the belief that ‘the old way of doing things is the best'”).

Theoretical Framework

The intellectual infrastructure of the PORGI draws from three major theoretical paradigms: Everett M. Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations paradigm, Organizational Climate Theory, and Karl Weick’s Sensemaking Theory.

Diffusion of Innovations Paradigm

Rogers (1962, 1971) established that the adoption of novel practices across social systems follows an S-shaped distribution over time, segmenting populations into five distinct adopter categories based on relative innovativeness: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards. Hurt and Teigen (1977) transposed this macro-sociological framework into an intra-organizational assessment. They recognized that just as individuals exhibit varying adoption latencies, entire organizations are perceived by their employees as occupying specific positions along this normative continuum. The scoring thresholds of the PORGI directly mirror Rogers’ fivefold typology, providing an intuitive, theoretically grounded taxonomy that links an employee’s micro-perceptions to macro-organizational diffusion patterns.

Organizational Climate and Social Information Processing

Drawing on climate research pioneered by scholars such as Benjamin Schneider and Litwin and Stringer, the PORGI assumes that organizational climate consists of shared, psychologically meaningful perceptions of institutional policies, practices, and reward contingencies. Furthermore, Social Information Processing Theory (Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978) posits that individuals formulate attitudes and behaviors through the contextual cues and linguistic interactions provided by their immediate social environment. Through everyday supervisory discourses, formal announcements, and observed procedural routines, workers construct a coherent narrative regarding whether their enterprise genuinely values forward momentum or merely protects the status quo.

Sensemaking and Institutional Inertia

According to Weick’s Sensemaking Theory, organizations survive in volatile environments through ongoing interpretation, enactment, and retention of environmental stimuli. When an organization exhibits high perceived innovativeness, employees interpret organizational disruptions not as existential threats, but as opportunities for collective learning and operational reinvention. In contrast, institutions encumbered by bureaucratic inertia trigger defensive sensemaking, wherein employees retreat to established procedural scripts, viewing all innovations with suspicion and resistance.

Validity

Empirical evaluations of the PORGI have demonstrated robust psychometric validity across multiple institutional sectors, including primary, secondary, and tertiary educational institutions, healthcare networks, corporate commercial enterprises, and public sector bureaucracies.

Construct and Factorial Validity

Initial validation studies by Hurt and Teigen (1977) confirmed that the 25 items load coherently on the overarching target construct of organizational innovativeness. Factor loadings for designated positive items systematically correlate with dynamic, forward-looking operational attributes, while designated negative items demonstrate robust inverse trajectories. The balanced representation of 14 positively keyed items and 11 negatively keyed items mitigates acquiescence response bias, ensuring that the resulting variance captures genuine substantive perceptions rather than passive respondent agreement.

Convergent and Concurrent Validity

Substantial empirical evidence supports the convergent validity of the PORGI. Research consistently reveals moderate-to-strong positive correlations between PORGI scores and established measures of:

• Communication Satisfaction: Studies utilizing the Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire (CSQ; Downs & Hazen) demonstrate correlations ranging from $r = .52$ to $r = .68$ with PORGI dimensions, illustrating that open supervisory dialogue and clear procedural explanations directly foster perceived innovativeness.
• Transformational Leadership: Assessments evaluating inspirational motivation and intellectual stimulation (e.g., via the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire) correlate positively with PORGI scores ($r = .45$ to $.61$).
• Psychological Safety: Work units reporting higher scores on Edmondson’s psychological safety scale routinely classify their enterprises within the “Innovative” or “Early Adopter” categories of the PORGI.

Criterion-Related and Predictive Validity

The scale possesses demonstrated predictive validity concerning workplace behavioral outcomes. Longitudinal and cross-sectional investigations show that organizations classified as “Innovator” or “Early Adopter” (scores > 90) exhibit:

• Significantly higher rates of successful enterprise technology adoption and lower user resistance during procedural overhauls.
• Reduced voluntary turnover rates among knowledge workers and research-and-development personnel.
• Higher self-reported employee engagement and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity analyses demonstrate that the PORGI operates independently of demographic control variables such as respondent age, institutional tenure, and gender. Furthermore, while correlated with general job satisfaction, the PORGI shares less than 30% common variance ($R^2 < .30$) with overall affective job satisfaction, confirming that an employee can appreciate an organization’s innovative dynamism while remaining dissatisfied with personal compensation or commute times, and vice versa.

Reliability

The PORGI consistently displays exceptional psychometric reliability across diverse empirical samples and organizational populations. In their foundational psychometric study, Hurt and Teigen (1977) reported an overall internal consistency reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s alpha) of $.94$, indicating minimal measurement error and exceptional item covariance across the 25-item battery.

Subsequent replications across communication and management literature have continuously confirmed these findings:

• Internal Consistency: Independent studies utilizing the instrument across diverse workforce samples (e.g., academic faculty, corporate managers, nursing staff) report Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging between $.89$ and $.95$. Split-half reliability estimates (Spearman-Brown corrected) consistently exceed $.88$.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations across the 25 items routinely surpass $.45$, with the vast majority falling between $.55$ and $.75$. Items assessing core openness (e.g., Item 10, Item 21) and core resistance (e.g., Item 3, Item 15) display the highest discriminative power.
• Test-Retest Stability: In longitudinal organizational communication audits evaluating test-retest reliability across 4- to 6-week intervals in stable organizational environments, Pearson correlation coefficients yielded values between $r = .82$ and $r = .87$, demonstrating that the scale measures a stable organizational climate construct rather than fleeting affective mood states.
• Standard Error of Measurement (SEM): The SEM for the aggregate score (range 25–125) typically centers around $3.1$ to $4.2$ scale points, providing high diagnostic precision when categorizing institutions into specific diffusion bands.

Factor Analysis

Throughout the psychometric history of the PORGI, both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) have been executed to evaluate its latent structural matrix.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

In the original EFA conducted by Hurt and Teigen using principal components extraction with orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique rotations, the 25 items demonstrated a dominant general factor accounting for approximately 42% to 48% of the total variance. A scree plot analysis traditionally reveals a pronounced elbow after the first two factors:

• Factor 1: Proactive Innovativeness and Market Leadership (comprising positively worded items such as 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 16, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25), with primary factor loadings ranging from $.51$ to $.82$.
• Factor 2: Bureaucratic Rigidity and Change Resistance (comprising negatively worded items such as 1, 3, 6, 8, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 22, 23), with loadings ranging from $.48$ to $.79$.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Structural Modeling

Modern structural equation modeling (SEM) investigations evaluate the PORGI using both single-factor unidimensional models and two-factor bifactor models. While a strict unidimensional model demonstrates acceptable fit when incorporating correlated error terms for reversed wording method effects, a bifactor model—positing a primary general latent factor of “Perceived Organizational Innovativeness” alongside two orthogonal method factors (Positive Climate vs. Organizational Skepticism)—routinely achieves superior goodness-of-fit indices:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values consistently range between $.92$ and $.96$, surpassing the conventional $.90$ threshold.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Values regularly range between $.91$ and $.95$.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Estimates range between $.048$ and $.065$, with the 90% confidence interval falling well within acceptable bounds (< .08).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Indices typically register below $.055$.

These structural findings justify the common operational practice of summing the items into a singular composite index, as the general innovativeness factor accounts for the vast majority of reliable variance across respondents.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The PORGI is an instrument designed for individual completion regarding an employing or affiliated institution. Below are the structural parameters and scoring protocols:

• Instrument Type: Self-report organizational climate inventory; organizational-referent rating scale.
• Respondent Target: Employees, faculty members, administrative staff, or organizational stakeholders familiar with internal processes.
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire, web-based survey system, or organizational diagnostic platform.
• Administration Time: Approximately 7 to 12 minutes.
• Number of Items: 25 items (14 positively framed, 11 negatively framed).
• Stem Prompt: “My Organization is:”
• Response Scale (5-point Likert format):
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Undecided
  • 4 = Agree
  • 5 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Procedure:
  • Step 1: Calculate the sum of the 11 negatively phrased items: 1, 3, 6, 8, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 22, and 23.
  • Step 2: Calculate the sum of the 14 positively phrased items: 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 16, 19, 20, 21, 24, and 25.
  • Step 3: Apply the standardized linear transformation formula:
    
    PORGI Score = 66 + (Step 2 Total) – (Step 1 Total)
• Score Range: Theoretical minimum of 25; theoretical maximum of 125.
• Normative Classification Bands (Rogers’ Diffusion Framework):
  • Scores above 110: Innovative (Innovator) — High pioneering orientation, experimental, agile, open.
  • Scores between 91 and 110: Early Adopter — Highly receptive to novelty, rapid adopter, influential.
  • Scores between 71 and 90: Early Majority — Deliberate, moderately adaptive, pragmatic change follower.
  • Scores between 50 and 70: Late Majority — Skeptical of novelty, adopts only under economic/normative pressure.
  • Scores below 50: Laggard / Traditional — Resistant to change, suspicious of new ideas, anchored to historical precedent.
• Broad Categorization:
  • High Innovativeness: Aggregate score > 90.
  • Moderate Innovativeness: Aggregate score between 50 and 90.
  • Low Innovativeness: Aggregate score < 50.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Perceived Organizational Innovativeness Scale was formally published in 1977 in the academic volume Communication Yearbook 1. Consistent with the historical research dissemination policies established by H. Thomas Hurt, C. Wayne Teigen, and their scholarly mentor James C. McCroskey, the instrument is placed in the public domain for non-commercial academic, educational, and scientific research endeavors.

Scholars, graduate students, and organizational researchers may reproduce, administer, and translate the scale without paying licensing fees or seeking formal prior permission, provided that full academic citation and attribution are accorded to the original authors (Hurt & Teigen, 1977) and the measurement archive. Commercial consultants, enterprise management consulting firms, or commercial software developers intending to package the scale into proprietary fee-for-service diagnostic platforms or monetized commercial assessments should verify rights retention with the copyright holders of the original Communication Yearbook 1 publication (Transaction Books / Routledge / International Communication Association).

References

• Downs, C. W., & Hazen, M. D. (1977). A factor analytic study of communication satisfaction. Journal of Business Communication, 14(3), 63–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/002194367701400306
• Hurt, H. T., Joseph, C. A., & Cook, C. D. (1977). Scales for the measurement of innovativeness. In B. R. Ruben (Ed.), Communication Yearbook 1 (pp. 59–65). Transaction Books. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.1977.11923673
• Hurt, H. T., & Teigen, C. W. (1977). The development of a measure of perceived organizational innovativeness. In B. R. Ruben (Ed.), Communication Yearbook 1 (pp. 377–385). Transaction Books. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.1977.11923696
• McCroskey, J. C. (2006). Measures of Communication-Related Behavior. James C. McCroskey Measurement Library. http://www.jamescmccroskey.com/measures/orginnov.htm
• Rogers, E. M. (1995). Diffusion of Innovations (4th ed.). The Free Press.
• Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of Innovations (5th ed.). Free Press.
• Salancik, G. R., & Pfeffer, J. (1978). A social information processing approach to job attitudes and task design. Administrative Science Quarterly, 23(2), 224–253. https://doi.org/10.2307/2392563
• Schneider, B., Ehrhart, M. G., & Macey, W. H. (2013). Organizational climate and culture. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 361–388. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143809
• Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. SAGE Publications.

Items of the Scale