The reassuring effect of firms' technological innovations on workers' job insecurity
Abstract
Purpose
This work analyses how the adoption of technological innovations correlates with workers' perceived levels of job insecurity, and what factors moderate such relationship.
Design/methodology/approach
The study makes use of the 2018 wave of the Participation, Labour, Unemployment Survey (PLUS) from Inapp. The richness of the survey and the representativeness of the underlying sample (including 13,837 employed workers) allow employing various empirical specifications where it is possible to control and moderate for many socio-demographic features of the worker, including her occupation and industry of employment, thereby accounting for various potential confounding factors.
Findings
The results of this ordered logit estimations show that workers' perception of job insecurity is affected by many subjective, firm-related and even macroeconomic factors. This study demonstrates that the adoption of technological innovations by companies is associated with lower levels of job insecurity perceived by their workers. In fact, the adoption of technological innovations by a company is perceived by surviving workers (those who remain in the same firm even after the introduction of such innovations) as a signal of the firm's health and its commitment to preserving the activity. Individual- and occupation-specific moderating factors play a limited role.
Originality/value
This study estimates how perceived job insecurity relates to the technological innovations adopted by the firms in which the interviewees are employed rather than analyzing their general concerns about job insecurity. In addition, this study identifies different types of innovations, such as product and process innovation, automation and other types of innovations.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
A draft of the paper has been presented at SISEC 2020, SASE 2020, EAEPE 2020, ASTRIL 2020 and SIE 2022 conferences. The authors thank all the participants for their fruitful comments. All errors are the authors'. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of INAPP.
Citation
Caselli, M., Fracasso, A., Marcolin, A. and Scicchitano, S. (2023), "The reassuring effect of firms' technological innovations on workers' job insecurity", International Journal of Manpower, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJM-02-2023-0072
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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