Technology and its Impact on Job Design

According to several researchers and academicians, technology is an entity that serves two purposes, it complements people working jobs by improving their ability to perform certain tasks and sometimes even replaces people by automatically doing their jobs for the firm they may be a part of. For example, during a crisis situation, people tend to call out for help from their phones, whether it is reporting an incident, comment on the measures taken to deal with the incident, or explore information revolving around the crisis. The most obvious response is via social media. Hence this paper helps realize that technology is, for most situations, the first helpful tool. The data collected via this technology is logistically analyzed, and then sent to respective agencies of law and journalism so that people employed to make decisions regarding the situation can fulfill their jobs. In this way, the collection part is done by technology, the transmission bit is also done by technology, the categorization is also, to some extent done via technology and the only job that humans fulfill is that of analysis and decision making.  Humanitarian responders are then assigned according to the seriousness of crisis at hand. This data collected from technological sources has insurmountable potential , especially within command and control, and can also be exploited because it has the capacity to increase the usefulness of the crisis response.

However, the collection of data has to be optimum, too much causes confusion in decision making, and too little is not enough to reach a decision, especially on social media. Therefore, it is important that we use the computational capacity of our machines in such a way that it results in making the analysts’ jobs more convenient and present them with the key features and relationships in the data that eases the path to a final decision.

(Gibson et al, 2016)

Technology can be a very helpful tool for the organizational design of an agency, and in the impact for job design, the role of organizational design has to be discussed. The managers have framed boundaries to be barriers that should be eradicated to aid in collaborative work. These boundaries have been examined in detail and experiments carried out to make sure that results prove a relation between social distance and interaction of the people, and also come across findings that show that changing the internal architecture of the firm can create more interaction opportunities. But are these opportunities availed by employees or not? This question has been answered in quite detail keeping the intellectual ability of individuals in mind, and its relevance to their sociable ability. A group’s ability to interact and work with each other was measured, and technology was made use of, for fulfilling this task. The people involved in the study were asked to wear a sensor, known as a sociometric badge which comprised of an infrared (IR) sensor that was for capturing the person they were facing, microphones that were for capturing if they were talking or listening, accelerometer that was used for capturing bodily posture, and another sensor making use of Bluetooth technology for capturing the location of the employee in the workplace. These sensors recorded data with 10 ms intervals. With all the data collected, it was analysed and noted that there was more virtual interaction than live. In another study which set the previous one as a control experiment, replication of the same data was done and some changes made, the results showed that some decreased virtual communication while others increased, and this was irrespective of the way the workplace was designed. The final conclusion was precise, that is, electronic interaction had substituted live interaction even when the firm underwent organizational design. As a result, productivity declined to some extent, because of lack of privacy of employees which brought a dip to their individual working performance and consequently affected their collective intelligence. (Turban et al, 2018)

Techno-stress refers to the feelings of stress and anxiety which are associated with technology and usage of technology at different levels. Literary pieces like (Florkowski, 2019) are beneficial because they present literature behind workplace production and job satisfaction because they are found to analyze this technostress and assess job satisfaction according to the models behind technostress, its link to HR department in companies and the rate at which human resource technologies are perceived qualitatively. Technostress also couples with organizational design factors and their combined effects are studied and research carried out to improve the quality of work of the HR environment. In this regard, more than 160 firms from the US and Canada were taken for survey and the perceptions of HR staff taken into consideration. The survey evaluated how techno-insecurity and techno-stress impact job satisfaction among the people working, and the people who are being worked for.  There are several hypotheses mentioned in various literary pieces, most of which are studied and discussed in this paper and their findings analyzed. These include, HR technology usages instills increasing stress levels which differ with a department’s technology literacy. HR personnel not having IT knowledge face the grave issue of having to master IT interfaces and come up with ways to counter new risks that technology might be prone to with every passing year. This has a negative effect on HRT work stress impact. Moreover, HRT job-insecurity impact will affect work stress positively. Aggravating the problems that HR is exposed to as a result of technology also include the possibility that HR may be seen as being a department that dodges its responsibilities by offloading work.

The findings found in the paper consider HR-staff attitudes in technology rollouts. We can also formally assess how collaborative work in the HR department is affected by HR technologies. These also interfere with upholding the capital that HR generates. Decreased capital would result in concern regarding job satisfaction in other professionals. (Florkowski, 2019)

Technology transfer, organization structuring, and academic entrepreneurship are important keywords to have a separate discussion delegated to them entirely in the subject of technology’s impact on job design. Literary pieces discuss that technology transfer is the commercialization of research based university work, and is one of the most well researched subjects in nations worldwide because of the intensity of the benefits that come about from it. One of the main ones is economic development, which stems from innovation and products released by employing different innovative strategies which aid the progression of existing industries, and also induce the birth of new industries. As a result, professors, academicians, researchers, practitioners and authoritarians all are adamant on promoting technology transfer because of which it is a well-known process. But as many benefits as it instigates, it is an extremely complex procedure owing to its requirement for monetary resources in substantial amount. Moreover, risk assessment methods, when implemented on technology transfer ecosystems, mostly have highly consequential and probable risks in store. When coupled with organizational design, technology transfer can become a blessing because the components of organizational design are interdependent because of technology transfer and within this ecosystem, structures undergo comparisons and researches which prove that resources are effectively utilized. Despite the affluence of the TT literature, we come to the conclusion that it focuses only on the technology transfer components separately, and rarely considers the ecosystem as a whole. It is imperative to review the organizational design of the TT ecosystem and indicate parameters of knowledge gaps found in it. While literature identifies four primary components of the TT ecosystem(TTOs, Science parks, incubators, university venture funds), new methods for studying the facilitation of academic entrepreneurship, such as university-based entrepreneurial ecosystems and accelerators are also coming to the surface.(Wright et al, 2019)

One of the technologies impacting job design in organizatons is SaaS(software as a service). It was beneficial for the firms, but had adverse effects on the people working in the IT department such as stress and anxiety. SaaS brought about advantage of cost effectiveness and scalability and was a user friendly interface for users but it had long-term adverse consequences which included the IT staff burdened by tasks like getting accustomed to the infrastructure change when the firm transitions from manual interface to SaaS, being familiar with the risks that come with any technology, eradicating those risks etc. Software management both at the employees’ and the clients’ side is done by the IT staff, which adds up to their overwhelming state. To assess the these factors, appropriate research models were designed by triangulating perspectives of users and IT professionals. As the responsibilities of the cloud computing provider increase and create a higher degree of SaaS usage, the firm’s original IT proficiency and organizational IT structures prove to be inadequate. Uptil now, the stance of current literature regarding this was trivial but a study was conducted based on individual-level research making use of the socio-technical system theory. This theory is one of the most effective ones regarding exploration of IT implementations in organizations; more than 30 academic journals and literary articles were reviewed to broadly complete the study in three fields of research. The findings showed that if the socio-technical consequences were not aligned, IT personnel will experience fear of redundancy and their lack of productivity will decrease productivity in the whole organization according to thesis of STS theory. Job satisfaction of professionals all depends on how highly radical the changes due to SaaS will be; a higher level of SaaS usage causes operational as well as organizational problems. Relevance of (Jede etal, 2016) can be seen prominently to the topic in question because it includes how SaaS can increase productivity and provides details on how it can change the social structures within an organization.

Fuel technology is often assessed by the use of decentralized energy systems and the analysis of this is an important aspect to review when discussing technology’s impact on job design.  Uptil now, the electricity requirements of the world were met by use of technology in a centralized way however with changing times, decentralized energy systems are employed for bringing about the distribution of energy. Layouts of technologies are laid forward and everything required to convert the distribution system from centralized to decentralized one are catered to by data collected. Conclusions based on findings were found to be more in favor of inclining to the decentralized method despite its lack of cost efficiency, because a decentralized method has better performance statistics.

It is worth noting that a decentralized energy system brings about benefits such as reduced carbon emissions, advancement in efficiency, cost effectiveness and preservation of credibility of the firm. The energy market and infrastructures are thus left with no choice but to develop these systems further. Optimization of this decentralized energy system will turn out to be a boon because for the energy efficiency and renewable penetration by the use of multi-energy systems. However, this system is quite challenging. These challenges such as the substantial amount of technology literacy required and resources needed to support full functionality of this technology , and fulfil the industry’s energy demands have prompted academicians and researchers to come up with computational algorithms and tools to deal with these issues. The agenda for the incorporation of decentralized energy systems and multi energy systems comprises of electrolyzers and fuel cells that are primary elements of electrochemical conversion technologies. This agenda is beneficial because it provides input on the decentralized framework of technology. (Gabrielli, 2018)

DEA ( Data Envelopment Analysis ) is a technique which has prior approaches and models associated with it, making it a highly centralized technique across the world of technology. It also has the efficiency principle that acts as a model however there are limitations to it, which make it challenging to perform analysis. The assortment of technology often proves to be a restraint, and to overcome it, researchers make use of meta data, meta technology ratio and relocate resources so as to avail full benefits. Research proves that several different kinds of DEA models have been put forth and their application tested in different fields out of which the most notable implementations are fixed cost allocation and resource allocation. The principles which are employed to successfully carry out these approaches are efficiency invariance principle, and efficiency maximized principle. But since technology has its own fair share of limitations, both these principles are often not taken into account in the desired way. Among DMUs, several technology gaps exist and this instills negativity in such a manner that needs to be countered with effective research and strategic skill. This can ultimately present more useful approaches. Analysis of these approaches is carried out and it is assumed that DMUs have similar production technology level which is more often than not, not the case. Calculations and summation formulae are taken into account to fulfill quantitative requirements of this research and find parameters that support findings and conclusions. Subjective as well as objective ways are employed to split the DMUs in organizations into groups called macro units like the social network platforms, rather than assess individually.

However, research proved that the efficiency of technology only progresses if centralization technique is applied on the DMUS in question and the shortcomings resulting due to allocation problems can be further investigated with research in the future.

(Ding et al, 2018)

The relationship between group technology and organizational structuring is one of the most important ones worth consideration when reviewing Technology’s Impact on job design.  For companies to own a competitive edge in market, there is a need for flexibility which comes about greatly at the expense of opting for group technology strategies. Several companies in the past have benefitted from organizational structures by reduction in operating costs, machine set-up time and clarity in roles and responsibilities shared among individuals,  however there were some limitations in the scope. When reviewing these aspects from literature, it is noted that there has been a poor link between the organizational design perspective and group technology, the only way group technology is studied is from an industrial perspective. Therefore to change the rules a little, applied systems theory was employed as a layout for studying organizational design with respect to group technology. This theory aimed at answering questions revolving around the position of group technology in the design of structures for production, the capabilities and issues regarding adoption of group technology, and the type of methods which are to be used to ensure long-term benefits. Consequently, research is conducted in such a way that three different cases are analyzed via the cluster analysis approach and the product flow approach to make groups of machines and workers in the manufacturing unit of companies. To further improve this research, another five cases are taken into consideration and findings amalgamated to reach a sound conclusion. The conclusion reflects how firms are considered about group technology when a poor performance is observed in their premises particularly regarding competitive pressure, response mechanisms, and accommodation of the constantly growing demand for better. This is because as a result of group technology, firms can separate the low priority tasks and delegate them to the employees lower in hierarchy. Therefore, it has a significant position among the range of answers for design of organizational structures. (Dekkers, 2018)

Academic literature is filled with avid authors making organizational design a focal viewpoint in their pieces. The use of strategic knowledge management is always coupled with the concepts of coding and personalization of the documented information. The real target was to enlighten the belief of strategic knowledge management in such a way that the executive committee of the respective organization which deals with IT related decisions, effectively understands that within an organization, there are limits to how knowledge is to be planned and propagated. If such an approach is adopted, outcomes will be robust and there will not be an unsteadiness situation in the organization where there is high innovation capacity and low work productivity instead equilibrium will be established. Corporations like Xerox suffered the consequences of not developing ways to make use of strategic knowledge management and this is what literature like (Willmot et al, 2017) aims to avoid. In this regard, analyzing is done of literary exemplars to answer why firms are required to emphasize on an equivalency strategy between coding and customization in the milieu of strategic knowledge management. This will bring about advancement in overall performance. Research findings show that there exist three insights and two pitfalls which any company wanting to adopt strategic knowledge management should know about. These insights are, firstly, a significant highlighting of codification and personalization might result in risks regarding the propagation of knowledge. Secondly, if an equilibrium is not established, there are little to no good outcomes on the organizational part because all efforts are considered scrappy. Thirdly, managerial employees should realize the need for equilibrium establishment. The pitfalls are, firstly, overriding of coding will create an over-disciplined atmosphere where there would be no room left for innovation and secondly, substantial reliance on personalization will leave no room for relevant routines and respect for ideas of employees. (Willmot et al, 2017)

Big data analytics deserves a separate seat on the table when reviewing technology’s impact on job design. Academic literature has, in detail, explained the capabilities and structural technicalities of big data and it is used to deal with large sets of data to improve performance. (Akhtar et al, 2019) has done commendable research on big data and has investigated areas of analytics that have not been explored before. Big data is a quite useful resource because it has benefitted organizations in terms of increasing their financial reporting greatly and has given employees necessary skills and enterprises the performance which is needed in the competitive global market which is becoming more and more technology oriented with every passing day. An outline of the research methodology when laid out in front of us helps us identify some limitations too and also clarifies the need for a high monetary input so that enterprises know beforehand what they are adopting. Not every organization has the human resources (both at an individual as well as collective level), industrial resources(machinery and well equipped knowledge of usage of this machinery) and technical resources(mathematics, logistics) which are a prerequisite for carrying out big data analytics. Nevertheless, research samples were taken from agri-food industries and based on the findings, hypotheses were proposed, which said that the performance of business and the results of the actions of big data development were both positively linked to the usage of the big data-savvy teams and the skills they possess. Organizations are explicitly mentioned that experienced improved service and product quality, punctual deliveries and addressed inaccuracy challenges with utmost expertise owing to big data simultaneously making sure that environmental concerns like recycling and water efficiency are not compromised. The conclusion of the research states how it plays a key role in measuring the gap earlier research of big data analytics. The research provided thorough insight to the evolution and implementation of big data analytics in business operations. (Akhtar et al, 2019)

A basic smart phone application can be helpful in studying the safety of insulin and ICT in a centralized clinical trial system. Literary examples have included hypotheses regarding the use of these and linked it to benefits brought about by use of conventional methods. The use of PHR is encouraged, which stands for Personal Health Record, an online application which helps patients in accessing, managing, and sharing their health data and helps doctors and personnel likewise to give improved decisions and perform remote check-ups of the patients enlisted for the clinical trial.  These records facilitate clients by maximizing the insulin dose adjustments made to their routine by monitoring levels of glucose, insulin and appropriate data collection of the patient. Research conducted to determine the safety and efficiency of PHRs and its application brought forward facts such as a confirmation that the ICT-based clinical trial was a stable one. Recruitment strategies varied according to subjects and their diagnoses, and the trial went on for 24 weeks at the end of which patients were randomly placed in two groups, one the ICT based intervention group and the other was the conventional intervention group. In the latter, subjects were asked to save and send their glucose and insulin information in addition to their step count through PHR application, while in the former, subjects received valuable feedback regarding their condition. The main hypothesis was that the former group was benefitted more than the latter group. Results of the research revealed that a centralized method of sharing and using information allowed better decision making for patients and also proved the stability of collection via the PHR application to make remote patient assessment convenient. This research studied the use of a centralized data system with respect to healthcare and showed new perspectives for future research. (Kim et al, 2017)

Decentralized networks like the P2P network are overviewed in quite detail in many different academic literary pieces which demonstrate the benefits of P2P that include, but are not limited to, load balancing, fault tolerance, and rapid data exchange. Reference to the implementation of decentralized networks in the past is also made as an attempt to draw a comparison between then and now and how the layouts varied. P2P ensured safety and privacy of users information both in the public network aspect and the private network aspect by preserving privacy where required. The research study procedure employed in (Kryukov, 2018) provides apt detail on how a decentralized scheme of networks can facilitate the job performance of employees hence it is reviewed in the umbrella of topic “Technology and its Impact on Job Design”.  Research is being conducted at a global level to carefully assess P2Ps in order to reap the advantages they offer, that is, being adaptive, operating perfectly even without special administration, and allowing flexibility to the participants of joining and leaving the network as they please. They are efficient highly because they result in good work performance as there is integrated usage of advanced computing resources via the Internet as well as proper organization of decentralized data storages.  In this review, attention is given to the last part i.e creation and organization of data storages. Data storages are further classified according to what they are used for, firstly those utilized in storing, searching, and exchanging public data and secondly, those utilized in storing private data, these systems are particular about security and reliability. The concerns of clients and adequate responses of IT personnel are both effectively navigated to one another based on distribution control methods. P2P decentralized networks can be further classified into unstructured and structured networks, examples of which are Chord and Freenet. It is thus demonstrated that the field of information technology has a lot to offer to P2P networks and to deal with technical problems, more research in the future has to be conducted. (Kryukov, 2018)

Data warehouses and business intelligence are inter related terms and are reviewed in literature side by side. Data warehouses are effective for storage purposes and business intelligence is favorable in the discovery of knowledge based on three different areas namely, diversification in data services, standardization in interfaces and monitoring of services. Research comprises of sample models and reference systems whose layout’s foundation is the intelligence business model framework itself. Whereas, the models are useful in specifying job functions and characteristics.

Distributed reservation is a key concept of the organizational design within a firm. Trends like data warehousing act as an inspiring factor in considering rather subtle computing techniques to enhance business strategies. These techniques come coupled with certain rules, such as assurance of the research having a sound and persuasive conclusion, minimum usage of multimedia such as images and visual audio and maximization of usage of textual and numerical data. In accordance with this rule, the paper was greatly comprised of tabular representations of statistical details of the research as well as diagrams like charts and graphs to show the trends. Mathematical formulae give quantitative results of the research and thus support the effectiveness of the procedure put forward. When these paradigms are presented in research based studies, issues in marketing models are solved to some extent and the impact of data warehousing and the transition resulting in job design from technicalities are understood.

Consequently, overall performance gets a boost and opens opportunities for future research that will follow the implementation of the models proposed and integrate them with usage of multimedia as a transfer medium. (Liao et al, 2019)

Shifting to the cyber era and the transition phase from conventional to technology based is one of the most challenging and demanding areas of job design because technology has been, and is continuing to advance every single day and while these may cause the parties involved to evolve greatly, they also give birth to more complex issues. Many changes of work design are complicated and still unexplored. However, to have a full understanding of these shortcomings, more than 40 people having extreme expertise in the digital field are questioned and their opinions surveyed. Employees of firms had a long lasting connection with their respective workplace and their roles within the firm were often exchanged by more competitive ones because of artificial intelligence and teleworking catering to the less important jobs. Technology causes technostress and poses as a threat to the leadership skills of people in managerial positions, in addition to bringing substantial changes in the person’s professional as well as personal life. Four key themes were revealed which focused on work design and leadership with the first theme reflecting transition in the work life and health domain with everincreasing demands of workers and leaders. The second theme implied changes coming about due to the use of information technology that affected working media and collaborative processes. The third theme was inclined towards bettering the performance and discovering potential talent present in organizations and the fourth theme comprised of organizational hierarchies and the exchange of roles and responsibilities which happened as a result. Therefore, digitization in entirety can be very happening for an organization and academic literature acts as an assembling ground for the fragmented pieces of knowledge regarding the conversion of companies to technical ones. Thus, future research can benefit from these results and create awareness among owners of enterprises to fully equip themselves with the needed skills and resources to counter challenges of technology. (Schwarzmüller, 2018)

When technology is employed in workplaces, job design is greatly impacted and entire human roles within the workplace change.  A model is presented to study such changes in an enterprise. Job characteristics are quite complicated because certain jobs are an amalgamation of physical and technical cognitive skills. Cyber-physical systems(CPS) is the ultimate goal of almost all organizations in the business sector. Details of work design and job performance differ according to the sector where the personnel is present, that is, whether they are a part of production or managerial decision making.  Sensors and similar machinery have replaced employees because of the automation process. And the employees’ jobs have escalated to a high degree of complexity whereby they are supposed to make decisions, innovate and manage coordinated of these automated systems. It is true that literature is quite vague regarding how the transition towards CPS impacts work design.  Therefore, in our review, we aim to develop a layout in which qualitative and quantitative assessment will be carried out in great detail and will be related to the capabilities of CPS on demand and supply chain of the enterprise in addition to human information processing. Technology’s main role is to improve human productivity but when this comes at the expense of their job autonomy, it brings about adverse effects. The processes and outcomes of the structural hierarchy of work is the determining factor in individual as well as organizational success. Therefore to have an understanding of these integrated processes and systems, knowledge regarding IT, mechanics and electronics is mandatory to avoid malfunctioning systems. This analysis is useful however the limitations provide directions to future researchers.

(Waschull et al, 2020)

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