Technological Change in the Workplace and Job Satisfaction

Talk by Timothy Hinks (University of the West of England) as part of the Research Seminar Series of the IOS Economics Department.

The return once again of technological anxiety and fear of new technologies in the form or IR4.0 has resulted in many academics from across different fields predicting another avenue for an existential crisis. New technologies can displace some tasks or replace entire occupations, whilst simultaneously contributing to new tasks and creating new occupations. Whilst the majority of empirical evidence to date paints an overall negative effect on employment, there is less research focussing on how workers are acting and reacting to using new technologies in the workplace. Do these new technologies reduce boring and monotonous tasks and contribute to improved worker well-being? Do these new technologies create a technology-earnings premium that benefits higher educated workers, as happened with the mass integration of computers in the 1980s? Do these new technologies mean more or less task discretion and autonomy in the workplace?  Do workers who have been exposed to these new technologies fear being displaced? In this paper we use a cross-sectional dataset for European Union countries to test what impact technological change at the organisational level and at the individual-level has on job satisfaction.

We also ask whether workers:

• who say that some tasks have been displaced by new technologies report a change in job satisfaction
• who now have new or different tasks as a result of new technologies report any change in job satisfaction and
• who are more productive as a result of new technologies report any change in job satisfaction?

Finally, it investigates whether workers who have been exposed to technological changes in their current job and at the organizational level are more likely to anticipate certain aspects of their job being replaced.