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.
Highlights
In the current era, technology is bringing about many changes: the way in which businesses create and capture value, when, where and how people do their work and the ways in which individuals interact and communicate with each other (Schwab, 2016)
Industrial revolutions have always been characterized by technological leaps, ever since the very beginning of industrialization: the First dates back to the end of the 18th century with the advent of mechanization based on water and steam; the Second occurred at the beginning of the 20th century with the intensive use of electrical energy to enable mass production; after World War II, the Third Industrial Revolution introduced electronics and information technology to automate production
The Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIR) is mainly characterized by the advent of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) the blending of hardware and software that can interact with humans to complete work), artificial intelligence and machine learning (Baldassari and Roux, 2017)
Summary
Technology is bringing about many changes: the way in which businesses create and capture value, when, where and how people do their work and the ways in which individuals interact and communicate with each other (Schwab, 2016). There is little research on the human-psychological aspects associated with this shift and its influence on work systems, organizations and workers’ preparation and well-being (Barley, 2015) Contributions in this field are, in most cases, for or against the technological revolution, aimed at defining optimistic or worrying scenarios for the future of workers and organizations. The paper does not represent a systematic literature review but tries to offer a short overview of the main questions that may arise from a WOP perspective, referring to the most relevant publications in scientific databases, such as Scopus or Web of Science, regarding the possible implications of the FIR for workers In doing so, this mini review aims to call for more research and interventions in the WOP field.
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