부산대학교 도서관

Work design theory research has a long and rich tradition in the industrial and organisational psychology. Work design identifies tasks, activities, relationships, and responsibilities in a specific job. It provides a comprehensive job description useful for examining and creating optimal working conditions, also by developing empowering workers or by restructuring their responsibilities. Human-robot interaction is among the domains with a high demand for work design. It is related to the widespread human fear of being replaced by machines at work, as well as the still small number of publications in this field, mostly devoted to human-robot interaction analysis conditions. Scholars have identified an elaborated set of tasks by a human during working with a robot. From work design perspective, besides expanding what tasks are considered, it is crucial to consider its meaning for creating critical psychological states, which are important for individual and organisational results. Thus, the paper preparation’s impetus describes and analyses the tasks carried out by robot operators in a more precise manner, by using psychological work analysis from the work design perspective. The research group consists of 32 robot operators from a large international manufacturing company. The Work Design Questionnaire (WDQ) by Morgeson and Humphrey (2006) was used to describe 21 of work characteristics. Results show that Task Variety, Information Processing, Task Identity, Specialisation, Skill Variety, Problem-solving, Task Significance, Received Interdependence, Feedback From Others, and Feedback from Job are the highest work characteristics of robot operators. It suggests that robot operators distinguish non-routine, cognitive, and interpersonal tasks as more substantial than other tasks. Alike, according to the work design theory, the work characteristics indicated by respondents are recognised as important job-specific factors for workers’ critical psychological states i.e., experiencing meaning, feeling responsible for outcomes, and understanding the results of their efforts, and helping shape the context of the work. It is imperative that further and more extensive research is conducted to bring more attention to how work design can support individuals’ cognitive, social, and identity development in human-robot interaction.