Time for Climate Change: Leadership, IT Climate, and their Impact on Organizational Performance

Abstract

Information systems (IS) have become essential for operating firms successfully. How to align business and information technology (IT) executives to in-crease organizational output has been widely dis-cussed in literature. This research focusses on pre-requisites and consequences of a positive IT climate in organizations where the need for deep IT and business knowledge is constantly increasing. We shed light on how organizational leaders, both from business and IT, influence a positive organizational IT climate by IT leadership and subsequently, how an organizational IT climate affects strategic align-ment and firm performance. By applying a two steps approach, this study evaluates the results of a survey among 322 IT decision makers in the U.S. working in knowledge-intensive and less-knowledge intensive industries. Our findings illustrate that IT leadership and IT climate differ between the two groups, and can confirm organization wide firm IS knowledge as a strategically important resource to achieve organ-izational performance.