Most extant literature in the transportation industry views innovation adoption as a rational choice process conducted on a cost-benefit calculation basis. This restricts our understanding of innovation decisions made by individuals embedded in a social-economic context. By investigating the underlying social psychology of the innovation adoption in the Chinese container trucking industry, this paper aims to answer the question as to ‘why trucking operators postpone adopting the cargo-truck matching system during its early stage’. In order to achieve the research objective, a mixed methods research framework is proposed. First, we conduct four in-depth interviews using semi-structured questionnaires to investigate the contextualized behavior of individuals, based on which three hypotheses are developed. Second, based on the data collected from an online questionnaire survey covering 282 trucking operators in Ningbo, the proposed empirical hypotheses are tested using a discrete choice model. We find that risk tolerance positively moderates influence of the status quo on the innovation adoption decision, whilst the effect on it of service-orientation is negative.