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While staffing agencies are gaining importance in work relationships with the highly skilled workforce, their work relations with highly skilled independent contractors have not been investigated yet. Staffing agencies as labor market intermediaries charge a fee to help independent contractors as well as client organizations to create contracts for services while independent contractors remain self-employed. Besides their growing relevance, their exact role remains unclear. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of staffing agencies in work relationships with highly skilled independent contractors.

The authors applied a mixed-methods design comprising a qualitative interview study with independent contractors and staffing agencies’ representatives (n=29) coupled with a quantitative survey of staffing agencies (n=81).

The analysis shows that staffing agencies are important actors in work relationships with highly skilled independent contractors. However, the relationships can be differentiated into rather standardized ones on the one hand and individualized relations on the other hand. This seems to correspond with differences between sectors.

First, the authors discuss staffing agencies as new intermediaries and highlight their relevance in the negotiation of working conditions. Second, the authors emphasize variations of the role of staffing agencies in triadic work relationships of highly skilled independent contractors in relation to specificities of sectors. Third, the study also adds on organizational support theory and related research.

Digital technologies comprehensively change work processes and working conditions. However, the use of digital technologies and the modes of collaboration between technologies and human workers differ in terms of specific work organization and automatization. Referring to the job demands-resources model (JD-R), this paper investigates job demands and resources from the workers' perspectives and develops a digital work typology according to dimensions of digitalization and forms of human–computer interaction (HCI).

The authors conducted a qualitative-empirical study with 49 interviews in four German production and logistics organizations, emphasizing different job demands and job resources for five digital work types identified.

The results indicate that job demands and resources are to be differentiated in relation to specific work contexts. In this sense, this paper presents an analysis of dimensions of technology use and the impact of technology use on working conditions through empirically analyzing job demands and resources in digital work settings.

The contribution of this paper is to empirically analyze job demands and resources in digital work settings from the workers' perspectives and to develop a digital work typology based on the dimensions of digitalization and form of HCI. This typology can set the basis for further research insights as well as management practice measures in human resources management (HRM).

Digitalization is changing organizations with positive and negative impacts such as increased autonomy on the one hand and increased surveillance and control on the other hand. In this context, new modes of control occur: in addition to managerial control, new modes of control are multi-directed, stemming from colleagues, customers and underlying algorithms. This paper investigates the interrelation of autonomy and new modes of control in digital work contexts from the workers’ perspectives.

Empirical data are based on a mixed-methods approach combining qualitative interviews with 25 and a quantitative questionnaire with 127 workers from urban food logistics organizations in Germany.

The results show that new modes of control are relevant for work engagement in digital work contexts: managerial and algorithm control are perceived as support. Peer and customer control are perceived as coercion.

Besides investigating the interrelation of autonomy and control and differentiating new modes of control, our study also makes important contributions to the perception of control as support and coercion.