Work and Organizational Psychology Looks at the Fourth Industrial Revolution: How to Support Workers and Organizations?

Abstract

With rapid advances in technology in several fields of human life, we are entering the Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIR), which is changing the way businesses create value, people do their work and individuals interact and communicate with each other. In this framework, many questions have arisen about how these transformations affect workers, organizations and societies, and Work and Organizational Psychology (WOP) has been called upon to address some of these open issues. In particular, this article focuses on two aspects of the FIR. The first considers the expansion of automation in the workplace and raises questions such as: how is the relationship between workers and technology changing? How is it affecting people’s well-being? How can we expect it to affect employment and equality in the future? The second is related to how job transformation will influence requirements for knowledge and skills; the main question is: which competence profile, considering hard and soft skills, is required and expected in the work of the future? The aim of the present paper is to improve the understanding of some of the major issues that workers and organizations are, or will be, asked to face, by providing information that will be useful to facilitate debate, research and interventions. In the conclusion section, research, and practical implications at organizational, political and institutional levels are discussed.

The Promotion of Technology Acceptance and Work Engagement in Industry 4.0: From Personal Resources to Information and Training

“…Nevertheless, an adequate level of autonomy and a supportive climate should be guaranteed through commensurate opportunities to be informed and trained [63]. Moreover, a crucial role in change process is played by leaders and supervisors; they can be supported in dealing with the transformations and the challenging requirements of the Industry 4.0 era [1] through specific interventions, which include classroom training, mentoring and individual or team coaching.…”

“…Rapid advances in technology, digitalization, smart technologies, automation and the industrial internet have enabled and characterized its progression. As with any previous industrial revolution, this one, too, has important economic, political and social implications, and deeply modifies how organizations function and how people work [1]. According to Schwab [2], the fourth industrial revolution is also different from the previous ones, since (1) it evolves at an exponential, rather than linear, speed; (2) it disrupts almost all industries; and (3) it is able to impact production, management, and governance.…”

“…Work engagement, indeed, which is a state of motivation, enthusiasm and energy caused by work, is considered one of the work-related wellbeing dimensions [12] and, more specifically, has been associated to psychological and physical health at work [13]. Enhancing positive work experiences and promoting employees' work engagement is an organization's responsibility towards public health, which becomes even more important in the current Industry 4.0 era, where new technologies are changing the relationship between individuals and their work, with potential costs for their wellbeing [1].…”

Robotic Process Automation and Consequences for Knowledge Workers; a Mixed-Method Study

“…As a result, we still see the widely cited but largely untested claim that knowledge workers will walk free from the negative consequences of automation, as being replaced or laid off. We lack empirical studies that can confirm or challenge this claim, and thus we do not know how RPA is influencing workers through their tasks in organizations, and whether and where automation might support humans or rather be taking over their jobs [11]. The development in cognitive technologies calls for further theorizing as it challenges central conceptualizations in the literature.…”

Knowledge Management – Education in the Light of Industry 4.0

“…The issue of Industry 4.0 is the one extensively analyzed and described (Li Da Xu et al, 2018;Ślusarczyk, 2018;Roblek et al, 2016;Lasi et al, 2014;Paprocki, 2016). Its assumptions, among others, relate to automation and digitization of processes in enterprises (Davis et al, 2012;Yin et al, 2018;Chiarvesio and Romanello, 2018;Almada-Lobo, 2016), construction of business models (Fettermann et al, 2018) or relationships between automation and the employer (Ghislieri et al, 2018). Rapid progress in industrialization in connection with the methods used in computerization contributed to significant progress in the development of the new generation of production technology.…”