How digital technology is reshaping the art of management

This study describes how the digitisation of the workplace may contribute to the emergence of data-driven management, and how this, in turn, may affect work organisation and aspects of job quality, such as occupational health and safety. It summarises and defines the technologies that enable data-driven management and provides a snapshot of their diffusion across Europe. The paper shows how some technologies are fairly widespread, while other are found only in a minority of establishments. The descriptive analysis presented in this research report shows that technologies enabling data-driven management may have both positive and negative impacts on workers and working conditions. Better establishment performance, provision of training, greater job complexity and worker autonomy are among the positive impacts associated with the presence of some digital technologies enabling data-driven management at the establishment level. By contrast, lower workers’ well-being and a higher prevalence of reported psychosocial risks in the workplace are among the negative impacts. The paper suggests that workplaces can introduce a number of measures to mitigate the potentially negative impact of data-driven management on workers’ wellbeing.

Authors

Urzì Brancati C., Curtarelli M., Riso S., Baiocco S.