A human-centric approach to IIoT integration in workers’ job designs

The term Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) describes manufacturing systems where smart devices are connected under a unique network. When workers are still required in the operations, the presence of IIoT complements their work, often modifying their traditional job characteristics. With the term job characteristics, we refer to a set of design attributes that describe the activities that workers perform daily in an organizational context (e.g. job autonomy, job complexity, feedback from job, task variety). Moreover, a change in the job characteristics would affect humans’ working life in turn. In this regard, it needs to be considered that the job characteristics’ outcome would not depend only on the choice of the technology itself, but also on the extent to how IIoT is deployed. A context where human-centered practices (HCPs) are habitually applied, for instance, may eventually lead to integrate the same technologies differently. Accordingly, this research aims at measuring the impact of IIoT on job characteristics and the moderating role of human-centered practices on this relationship. To address the research questions, this study leverage a database of 104 workers, divided per 18 production line. Findings prove that IIoT positively influences job autonomy and feedback from the job, and negatively influences job complexity. Moreover, where HCPs are applied, we measured a higher perception of job autonomy, feedback from job and task variety while a lower perception of job complexity.