Managing Failures of Automation through Adaptive Interdependence: The Importance of Human Skill during Rapid Technological Advancement | WIP Seminar with Jenna Myers

When and Where

Wednesday, February 12, 2025 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm
CIRHR Room 205

Speakers

Jenna Myers, CIRHR Assistant Professor

Description

THIS IS A HYBRID EVENT

JOIN ZOOM MEETING
Meeting ID: 892 0721 0756
Passcode: 723963

Abstract | Automation—the use of technologies to replace humans in performing workplace tasks—can be challenging to achieve reliably. Prior research has explained how organizations can detect and minimize automation failures through top-down process design and bottom-up adaptations, including workarounds. However, this research does not adequately address how to manage automation during periods of rapid technological advancement, when failures become more volatile. I study this issue through a nine-month ethnography of a microelectronics manufacturer that grappled with a rapidly changing technological portfolio to maintain state-of-the-art production. My analysis suggests that the organization deployed its frontline workforce in a way that was neither fully pre-designed nor fully improvised, but which allowed the organization a reliable way to manage automation failures by flexibly using its workforce to perform tasks manually when needed. I argue that the organization’s use of this adaptive interdependence model suggests a new, important way that organizations can manage human-technology interdependence by using humans to augment technologies (rather than viewing technologies as a means for augmenting human potential). Additionally, while dominant perspectives emphasize the importance of complementary skills (e.g., problem solving and critical thinking) in response to technological advancement, this study suggests that human skill in performing substitutable tasks will also remain necessary for organizations to achieve high performance within shifting technological landscapes.

Jenna Myers is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources who uses qualitative field methods to study the changing nature of work, institutions, and technology. She currently has two streams of research combining organization theory, industrial and employment relations, and technology/innovation management. In the first stream, she studies the occupational dynamics surrounding worker voice and situated learning during the introduction and use of new technologies in the workplace. In the second stream, she studies the interorganizational relationships among education and labor market institutions for workforce development, with a particular focus on educator-employer partnerships. Her research appears in peer-reviewed journals of management and industrial relations, including Organization Science and ILR Review. Before joining the Centre, she completed her PhD at the MIT Sloan School of Management.