While technology adoption is common practice in modern organizations, understanding individual attitudes towards emerging technologies, such as Virtual Reality, is crucial for successful digital transformation, especially in traditionally non-digital sectors like the care industry. Our study, conducted in elderly care homes, who decided to introduce VR technologies for a pilot period of three months, included 99 semi-structured interviews with employees, leaders, and seniors. Over these months, we observed their engagement with and attitudes towards the technology. Over the course of the time, it became evident that while most organizations faced initial implementation challenges, there were mainly two explaining mechanisms that separated the organizations adopting VR from non-adopters: (1) the initial motives of the staff and the leaders and the (2) the collective integration dynamics. By combining the technology acceptance model with the social judgement theory, we identified two distinct pathways influencing VR adoption: whereas a positive attitude and the willingness to experiment led to an upward spiral in technology adoption, resistance and frustration among staff resulted in a downward spiral. This study highlights the importance of individual and collective attitudes in the adoption of new technologies in the care industry and, hence, provides a multilevel lens of the technology acceptance model.
