Autor:in:
Guido Hertel, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
During the last 20 years, the commercial rise of the World Wide Web has caused fundamental changes in the way we communicate and interact with other people. These changes also affect the way we work, and how work processes are organized. Indeed, concepts such as e-leadership, e-recruiting, or virtual teamwork reflect the increasing influence of information technologies in almost all areas of work design and Human Resource Management. However, while initial psychological research has monitored and examined these newly evolving forms of work and work organization, more research is needed, and the existing research should be better integrated given the current distribution among very different outlets. In addition, academic research often lags way behind new technological developments in the field, requiring faster consideration of current and future trends.
In this keynote I will provide a review on the past and current developments in this exciting field, focusing both on changes as well as on challenges of digital technologies at work. In doing so, I will consider three different perspectives: The perspective of individual working persons affected by digitized collaboration media (e.g., work-life balance, work disruptions, cyber loafing, gamification, trust maintenance), the perspective of work organizations applying electronic human resource management tools (e.g., e-recruiting, e-leadership, e-learning, virtual collaboration, employee self-services), and the perspective of social societies dealing with various implications of these developments (e.g., sharing communities, Internet of things, flexibilities at the job market, challenges for social security systems). The results not only reveal promising areas for future research, but also the need for work, organizational, and business psychologists to initiate the development of digital media based on psychological requirements instead of mere reactions to evolving technological trends.