Adoptability of Solo Dining Practices in Restaurant Businesses: A Study from the Perspective of Diffusion of Innovations and Organizational Readiness

<jats:p>This study examines the organizational readiness of restaurant businesses for solo dining practices and its relationship with adaptation tendencies. Solo dining is considered not only as a consumer behavior for customers dining alone, but also as an innovation related to service design, spatial arrangement, operational capacity, and managerial decision-making processes for restaurants. The study utilizes a diffusion of innovation approach combined with an organizational readiness framework. Exploratory factor analysis and reliability analyses were conducted to evaluate the measurement structure; hypotheses were tested using correlation, regression, and one-way analysis of variance. The findings showed that relative advantage was the primary variable that significantly explained organizational readiness for solo dining. Accordingly, as restaurant businesses perceived solo dining as a beneficial practice that contributes to existing service processes, their readiness levels for this practice increased. In contrast, complexity, trialability, and spatial adequacy did not show a significant effect on overall organizational readiness. In additional analyses, it was determined that spatial adequacy had a significant effect only on ORIC-Efficacy . This result indicates that spatial adequacy is related more to the ability to implement the practice than to overall readiness. Furthermore, the lack of a significant effect of organizational readiness on adaptation revealed that the perception of readiness does not directly translate into an adaptation tendency towards the practice . Difference analyses showed that organizational readiness varied significantly according to position and professional experience. In particular, it was determined that kitchen chefs had a lower perception of readiness compared to senior managers and business owners, and that the level of readiness increased with increasing professional experience. offers a business-focused perspective on the solo dining literature, demonstrating that solo dining is a multi-dimensional service innovation for restaurants, shaped not only by customer experience but also by organizational capacity, perceived benefits, spatial adequacy, and professional positioning. However, the fact that readiness does not directly translate into adaptation reveals that additional factors such as customer demand, operational costs, service concept, staff engagement, and strategic alignment must also be considered for the successful implementation of solo dining.</jats:p>