Crafting Jobs and Sharing Social Space with Robots

摘要

Extensive research has documented the benefits of high-quality work design tasks and relational work characteristics resulting from top-down or bottom-up (i.e., job crafting) interventions. However, the nature of work is continually changing due to emerging technologies, such as robotics, and yet, we still know very little about how organization members make sense of these changes and craft their jobs in order to adapt. To advance our knowledge on these questions, we conducted 65 qualitative interviews with employees and managers at two large manufacturing companies that recently introduced industrial robots. We analyze employees’ perceptions and experiences of the robotization-led changes in work design and identify how employees respond to these changes through further crafting their tasks and social space at work to accommodate the new ‘coworker’; hence, the categories of task (technological) and relational (social) work characteristics though traditionally treated as distinct, are becoming highly interdependent. These insights have important implications for theory and future of work design and job crafting.