Concerns about Innovations in the Workplace

Examines the concerns profiles of 243 front‐line managers within Telecom Australia who were engaged in implementing two related innovations: (a)a new service policy called “Fix‐It‐First‐Time” and (b) a change in the functional role of front‐line managers. Results were considered to be broadly consistent with a developmental and stage model of concerns. However, the importance of concerns for this sample of workers was different from that suggested by previous research. The impact of innovations on colleagues, on clients and on their job security was paramount in this group, reflecting the fact that innovations occurred within a period of major retrenchment and redundancy. Results also confirmed a higher order structuring of concerns which occurs in the workplace and which goes beyond the original seven stages to encompass broadly defined personal concerns and impact concerns of the innovation. The implications of these findings are examined briefly in terms of an emerging critique of change management models for the 1990s.