A vibrant debate has emerged on the opportunities of digitalization for ‘humanizing’ work versus substitution or deskilling effects. Recognizing the processes of designing digitalized organizations as crucial for predicting the outcome of digitalization on workers and labor, extant research has developed an evolutionary ecosystem socio-technical (STS) perspective aimed at designing more human organizations in light of digital transformation. In this study we build upon the STS ecosystem analytical framework by Winby and Mohrman (2018), aiming to explore how the STS design principles, as proposed by said authors, are applied in three big manufacturing companies, in light of digitalization. Data collected through qualitative techniques has been analyzed abductively. Findings provide a detailed overview of how the STS ecosystem design principles are operationalized, and shed novel light on applied design methods, such as ‘agile’ and ‘design thinking’, able to support interconnection among systems, in a never-ending and iterative process. This study extends the existing ecosystem STS organization design conceptual model by exploring ‘how’ we change, ‘who’ the change is for, while also investigating ‘what’ this means for the hitherto conceptualized STS work-system. Implication for management practice and ODC scholarship are also discussed.

L'adozione delle tecnologie 4.0 comporta, per molte imprese, l'attivazione di processi di riprogettazione dell'organizzazione. Su questo tema, la teoria dei sistemi sociotecnici ha proposto alcuni principi di progettazione, volti a massimizzare le prestazioni organizzative e al contempo a preservare o sviluppare la qualità del lavoro degli operatori. Attraverso l'analisi di tre imprese che hanno investito nelle tecnologie digitali e contestualmente riprogettato le loro strutture organizzative, il presente studio fornisce evidenze in merito a come i principi di progettazione elaborati dalla teoria sociotecnica vengano oggi declinati, mostrando la possibilità che questa prospettiva possa (ri)diventare centrale sia nella teoria che nelle pratiche manageriali.

No abstract

No abstract

Current literature on Industry 4.0 technologies has mainly explored their relationship to the employment dynamics, or to the required competencies and emerging roles. This paper is complementing current literature with a perspective focused on organizational design. The aim of the paper is to explore how organizations are redesigned when Industry 4.0 technologies are implemented. The paper is based on 15 case studies carried out in Italian manufacturing companies and data was collected from 70 semi-structured interviews to relevant roles involved in the implementation of digital technologies. Results show that, when Industry 4.0 technologies are implemented, organizations are redesigned following an employee control-oriented or following an employee commitment-oriented organizational design. These results show that organizational design is the result of decisions, and is not determined by technology. The implications of our findings are presented and discussed.