Research

“[R]esearch revealed that restaurant and foodservice workers who regularly
use service robots in the dining room experience a complex set of issues and challenges related to robot reliability, management training and support, leveraging the robot to entertain the customer, feelings of dread, anger and frustration, and indications of decreased physical exertion as a proxy for well-being.”

” Utilizing the Eurobarometer 87.1 dataset, we found that country inequality, as operationalized via the Gini Index, was positively associated with perceptions that AI/robots pose threats of general job loss….These findings advance theory on inequality and suggest that the broader context—both objective and perceived—may play a role in how people view disruption associated with AI/robots at work.”

“[W]e propose a functional-identity framework to examine AI’s effects on people’s work-related self-understandings and the social environment at work. We argue that the conditions for AI to either enhance or threaten workers’ sense of identity derived from their work depends on how the technology is functionally deployed (by complementing tasks, replacing tasks, and/or generating new tasks) and how it affects the social fabric of work.”

“The goal of this chapter is to explore implications and uses of AI regarding worker stress, health, and well-being. We organize our thoughts within the US Surgeon General’s 2022 Framework for Workplace Mental Health. This framework provides five essential priorities to foster mental health and well-being in the workplace: protection from harm, connection and community, work–life harmony, mattering at work, and opportunity for growth. These considerations provide not only a structure in which to consider AI’s impacts on well-being, but also a set of guiding principles for AI development and implementation going forward….We hope that this framework and discussion
provide a foundation for readers to contribute to the development and implementation of technologies that promote both organizational effectiveness and human well-being.”

“We find that lower physical health predicted subsequent increases in job insecurity and higher physical health predicted subsequent decreases in job insecurity. However, job insecurity did not have a significant influence on physical health. Furthermore, higher job insecurity predicted subsequent decreases in mental health, and higher mental health predicted subsequent decreases in job insecurity. This pattern of findings suggests a dynamic and reciprocal within-person process wherein positive deviations from one’s average trajectory of job insecurity are associated with subsequently lower levels of mental health and vice versa.”

“[T]he findings suggest that precarity related to being able to keep one’s job and a sense of powerlessness at work contribute to concerns about the risk of COVID-19 exposure at work and, simultaneously, behaviors that may contribute to the health risks faced by others. This research provides added support to the argument that precarious work should be addressed in order to improve both worker well-being and public health.”

“The current study leverages and expands ideas from the Conservation of Resources theory about resource investment to examine how and when job insecurity is associated with behaviors indicative of promotive or protective job preservation strategies aimed at social or task targets…[Our findings] suggest that job insecurity is associated with strategic behavior when employees are facing proximal threats to their jobs; however, these efforts are rarely in the best interest of organizations.”

“[W]e analyzed repeated large-scale population surveys in the United States to examine the impact of fit between desiring and receiving job characteristics on job satisfaction across four time points (1989, 1998, 2006, and 2016). Moderated polynomial regression analyses indicated that employees in more recent years experience greater dissatisfaction by deficiencies in intrinsically-rewarding job characteristics.”

“This chapter considers the many ways digital technologies are changing work, exploring whether, how, and when the digitalisation of work serves as a blessing or a curse for worker health and wellbeing.

This chapter examines both the promises and perils of an
increasingly digitalized workplace. We explore how organizations and policymakers can harness the capabilities of STARA to support work and promote health, while mitigating risks such as work intensification, employee precarity, loss of autonomy, and privacy intrusions.”

“These insights provide an important psychological basis from
which to address the interconnected United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These goals emphasize the ways that economic growth should foster, rather than be pursued at the cost of, human and environmental prosperity. A psychological approach to sustainable economic growth and development underscores human well-being as both (a) a central outcome of and (b) central input to the functioning of economies… Below, I suggest that the power of a psychological approach to economic sustainability is demonstrated by considering findings from Industrial/Organizational Psychology in light of general models of how economies function. Moreover, disseminating these insights is crucial for shaping beliefs and inspiring action toward achieving the SDGs.”

“Using survey data from workers in a variety of industries, we found support for the distinctiveness of many CWB [Counter-Productive Work Behavior] motives. Additionally, CWB motives had distinct patterns of relationships with interpersonal versus organizational CWB.