Towards a holistic assessment of employees’ acceptance of innovative workplace designs

Purpose: The existing literature on the Activity Based Working (ABW) office concept and its acceptance is lacking a method to holistically evaluate it as an innovation. The purpose of this paper is to provide a model for evaluating employees’ acceptance of an innovation, specifically, an ABW office.Design/ Methodology/ approach: Research concerning Activity Based Working (ABW) offices tends to inconsistently evaluate individuals’ acceptance of it as an innovation. Studies within the ABW field tend to rely on large-scale employees’ satisfaction survey. Although these provide important results, these are often too broad and do not sufficiently explain why employees may be struggling to accept the ABW concept. This study draws on the innovation adoption, technology acceptance and existing ABW literature to provide a holistic model for evaluating employees’ ABW acceptance.Findings: A theoretical framework developed from the innovation adoption and technology acceptance literature is presented. This suggests that employees’ ABW acceptance is a conflated assessment of three dimensions: affective responses, behavioural responses and cognitive responses. Even though these may be interrelated, all three dimensions have to be assessed.Practical implications: The model presented here can serve as a useful assessment of employees’ acceptance of an innovation, specifically, ABW acceptance. This is critical because organisations are achieving mixed outcomes from the ABW but the research community are unclear why.Originality/ Value: This paper fulfils a need for a holistic and consistent way of assessing individual acceptance of an innovation or ABW.