PERSONAL quarterly 2/2020

8 SCHWERPUNKT _INTERVIEW PERSONALquarterly 02/20 by humans in the workplace, and how it can support the work goals. As an example, recently I was at a hospital, and some multi-million-dollar equipment was pretty much sitting in the hallway collecting dust. Why? Well it hadn’t been designed carefully with the input of medics, so they didn’t find it very useful. And worse, no one had received any training on the new technology, so they couldn’t use it even if they wanted to. But there are positive examples too – we are currently wor- king with the navy, for example, to help design future sub­ marines that will be more human-friendly 3 . PERSONALquarterly: But why should organizations take these steps? Surely the goal of achieving motivating work for employees is not sufficient? Sharon K. Parker: Creating good work should be a sufficient ratio- nale for organizations! That is, managers and employers should care about enabling and supporting motivating, meaningful work that is not overly stressful for people. But you are right, such arguments are often not enough to persuade employers and managers. Moreover, it’s often the case that considering the impact of technology on work quality is not even on the radar of technology designers, whose mentality and focus is on how technology can replace humans. What might persuade managers, employers, and designers, however, is that good and well-designed work has a number of benefits for organizations, as well as individuals. We know, for instance, that job autonomy fosters creativity and innovation. So, if we want people to be innovative at work, we need to intro- duce greater autonomy. Evidence is also accumulating that the most digitally-mature organizations are those that have more self-managing team-based approaches to work, rather than the traditional hierarchy. So, if organizations want their employees to more quickly embrace and adapt to new systems, they need to create good work design at the outset. PERSONALquarterly: How does all this relate to the concept of New Work? Sharon K. Parker: In essence, I am advocating that we should be aspiring to move closer to the ideas of New Work, when imple- menting new technologies. As I explained earlier, digital trans- formation and the associated pressure to innovate increasingly demand and promote agile, self-organized and highly custo- mer-oriented working principles. Not only the when and where of work, but also the mode of cooperation with colleagues and customers is changing. The concept of NewWork stands for the changed expectations of employees with regard to participa­ tion, autonomy and the creation of meaning through work. So, a positive view of technology is that it will support a move in this direction, away from hierarchies towards a coaching, lateral and supportive understanding of leadership. As I referred to earlier, unfortunately we also see techno- logies being used to intensify work and control people more tightly, which is the opposite of New Work. Whilst the full concept of NewWork might be a bit radical for many organisations, and indeed it is more wide-ranging than what I focus on here, I enthusiastically welcome any moves towards creating work that people experience as more mea- ningful, agentic, and aligned with their interests. PERSONALquarterly: Aren‘t there a lot of concepts in what you are suggesting that work and organizational psychologists have been vehemently advocating for decades? Sharon K. Parker: Yes! Absolutely. I already mentioned sociotech- nical systems thinking, as well as work design theories, which have been around since the 1950s. Lots of other concepts that have been in our field for a long time also have new resonance, such as the idea of trust. These days, we need to think about trust in automation, with problems emerging when there is insufficient trust (e.g., the neglect of the machine) and when there is excessive trust (e.g., when people get complacent about technology, and then it ‘surprises’ them). Another example is team work. In our field, we’ve long had an interest in team work and seen teams as valuable for achie- ving collective goals. But now teams will increasingly include robots or AI-based decision-making systems, so we need to think about teams from that perspective. We also need to rec­ ognize the role of big data in enabling and supporting collabo- ration in new ways. PERSONALquarterly: What can occupational psychologists do to support these developments? Sharon K. Parker: Our field has a tremendous amount to offer. Occu- pational/organizational psychologists learn about work design, so we have the expertise to help design better work. This exper- tise is important. We recently did a study where we asked people to design some hypothetical jobs 4 . We found that surprising numbers of participants were likely to design old-fashioned Tay- lorist jobs in which the workers carried out the same tasks over and over. Organizational psychologists, though, were more likely to design jobs with variety for workers. So, we have unique ex- pertise that is very important. As I discussed above, technology usually replaces ‘tasks’, not whole jobs, so designing ways that technology-enabled work is effectively integrated with human work is going to become a more and more important capability in the future. Attention will need to be given to the work design, trust, communication, complexity, and more. Organizational psychologists also have a powerful role to play with respect to other aspects of a digital world. Above I discussed 3 Boeing, A./Jorritsma, K./Griffin, M./Parker, S. K. (under review): A sociotechnical approach to early- stage technologically complex systems design: A case study. Australian Journal of Management. 4 Parker, S. K./Andrei, D. M./Van den Broeck, A. (2019):. Poor Work Design Begets Poor Work Design: Capacity and Willingness Antecedents of Individual Work Design Behavior. Journal of applied psycholo- gy. doi :http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/apl0000383