Employees’ Intention to Adopt the Digital Workplace: The Role of Companies in Promoting the Digital Transformation

For many knowledge workers, location-independent work is part of the new normal in the world of work. Therefore, individual and team work is more frequently taking place digitally. This physical separation of employees increasingly requires a connecting element to avoid productivity losses and support corporate loyalty. Suitable workplaces are necessary to avoid any loss of productivity and support corporate loyalty among employees. A technology-supported component that enables temporal and locational distributed knowledge work is the digital workplace. However, the success of this innovative working system depends on the employees’ intention to adopt the digital workplace. While the literature has already considered the design and implementation of the digital workplace intensively, more knowledge is needed on how companies can accelerate the adaptation process once the digital workplace has been introduced. Drawing on the diffusion of innovation theory, this chapter aims to identify the key factors influencing the intention to adopt the digital workplace on the individual, corporate and social levels. To this end, a cross-sector empirical analysis with n = 351 knowledge workers is conducted. The results show that individual and corporate factors influence the intention to adopt the digital workplace. The chapter provides several theoretical and practical contributions.