ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on understanding the transition process by analyzing a single case of partial automatization in office work. It aims to assess the productivity effects of partial automatization of office work and how employees adjust to digital change. The chapter considers adaptive performance to be a construct that indicates learning and individual adjustment to task-relevant changes caused by partial automatization of the work processes. The human agency in a complex, digitizing service production environment faces endless updates and successive but typically incomplete automatization projects. This raises concerns about employees’ abilities and motivation to adapt and, consequently, about the sustainability and true productivity impact of digital automatization. The chapter describes the effects of automatization on average tasks. It also focuses on the changes caused and productivity achieved by robotics and automatization. The research consisted of a quantitative analysis to assess productivity and a qualitative study on the meaning making of working with digital robots.
