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

Information systems (IS) have become essential for operating firms successfully. How to align business and information technology (IT) executives to increase organizational output has been widely discussed in literature. This research focusses on prerequisites 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 alignment 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 organizational performance.