CIOs (chief information officers) and IT managers must be able to drive innovation within their IT organizations and throughout the business because innovations are considered crucial for the competitive advantage of the organization. The role of organizational climate is also vital in IT innovation. The present paper explores the concept of innovative IT climates through the interviews of 36 CIOs identified as highly innovative. The authors in the introduction part of the paper discuss the changing dimensions of the IT, need for business innovation in the IT environment, and the role of organizational climate. They state that the present work aims at studying how leaders build an innovative climate as they work with others and as they design work processes and structures. In Section 2 of the paper, the authors discuss some theoretical and present works undertaken in organizational climate and leadership, IT climates and the innovation and IT climates. Figure 3 demonstrates the research question of the role of innovative IT climate as mediator of innovative IT practices. The authors have used the organizational climate theory dimensions, namely, peer relation, support, motivation to achieve and innovation as the factors for the present work. The fifth dimension called structure, referring to organizational climate manifest in organizational structures is also discussed. The resesarch method involves data collected by means of face-to-face interviews with 36 CIOs of companies identified as highly innovative. The two phases of data collection is explained in Section 4 of the paper. The qualitative analysis of the four theoretical dimensions forms Section 5 of the paper. Each dimension includes results of the analysis of the data on the dimension and the description of ways that CIOs talked about institutionalizing that dimension. In Section 6 of the paper, the findings of the second phase of the data collection, namety, the inductive analysis in the four dimensions of the theoretical model are presented for the grounded theory development. Two dimensions have emerged, namely, reality checking and promoting credibility. | The discussion, implications, and the limitations are presented in Section 7 of the paper. (1ll refs.)
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