The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of the Psychology of the Internet at Work

Guido Hertel, Dianna L. Stone, Richard D. Johnson, Jonathan Passmore, Guido Hertel, Dianna L. Stone, Richard D. Johnson

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119256168
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Industrie- & Organisationspsychologie

This authoritative Wiley Blackwell Handbook in Organizational Psychology focuses on individual and organizational applications of Internet-enabled technologies within the workplace. The editors have drawn on their collective experience in collating thematically structured material from leading writers based in the US, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

Coinciding with the growing international interest in the application of psychology to organizations, the work offers a unique depth of analysis from an explicitly psychological perspective. Each chapter includes a detailed literature review that offers academics, researchers, scientist-practitioners, and students an invaluable frame of reference. Coverage is built around competencies set forth by regulatory agencies including the APA and BPS, and includes E-Recruiting, E-Leadership, and E-Learning; virtual teams; cyberloafing; ergonomics of human-computer interaction at work; permanent accessibility and work-life balance; and trust in online environments.

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The Psychology of the Internet @ Work

Guido Hertel, Dianna L. Stone, Richard D. Johnson, and Jonathan Passmore

Introduction

The Internet has radically changed the way we work, and the way work is organized. Similar to other core technologies in the past, such as steam engines, electricity, or computer technologies, the Internet influences not only singular work activities or discrete branches, but affects nearly all aspects of work in a striking speed of time. For industrial and organizational psychologists, it is therefore essential to understand the implications of the Internet at work from different levels of analysis. At the micro level, Internet‐based technologies have significant implications not only for the experience and behavior of the individual worker, for her or his work motivation, trust experience, and individual performance, but also for health and wellbeing and for required competencies at work. At the meso level, the Internet offers new strategies for work organizations, for recruiting and selection of employees, for leadership and teamwork, and for training and development. At the macro level, Internet‐based work has implications for societies as a whole, creating new opportunities for economically underdeveloped regions and for the integration of disadvantaged workers, but also for new conflicts and legal problems in increasingly global workplaces. This edited handbook covers these three perspectives in an integrative way, providing state‐of‐the‐art reviews of existing research, guidance for future work, and suggestions for practitioners.

In this first chapter, we start with a brief history of the Internet at work to understand the specific characteristics of Internet‐based technologies that underlie different qualitative shifts in working conditions. In doing so, we identify five core characteristics of Internet‐based work that might clarify and structure the still divergent usage of concepts in this emerging field. Moreover, such a task‐oriented approach might help to analyze more precisely the various implications of Internet‐based technologies for work‐related experiences and behaviors as the main focus of work and organizational psychologists. We provide initial suggestions and examples for this idea, and illustrate general opportunities and risks of the core characteristics at the three main levels introduced above, that is, the individual worker, work organizations, and societies. After these more general observations, we provide a preview of the other chapters in this handbook. In addition to newest findings from scientific research in the different fields, the book provides best practices for the usage and optimization of these rapidly evolving technologies for different sectors and industries.

A Brief History of the Internet at Work

The high prevalence of Internet‐based technologies at work is reflected in a multitude of labels, such as “online” (e.g., online assessment), “web” (e.g., web‐based working), “virtual” (e.g., virtual teams), “e‐” (e.g., e‐leadership), “cyber” (e.g., cyber loafing), “tele‐” (e.g., telework), or “digital” (e.g., digital divide). Originating in different research traditions and disciplines, these different labels might be confusing when considering what the core attributes of Internet‐based work might be. For instance, Internet‐based work implies more than just electronically mediated information, and can also be relevant when people collaborate at short distances in the same building.

The Internet is a global communication system that connects private, public, academic, business, and government networks using a broad and constantly developing array of electronic, wireless, and optical technologies (Internet, n.d., retrieved November 15, 2016, from https://www.britannica.com/technology/Internet; see also Internet, n.d., retrieved November 15, 2016 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet). Thus, in addition to electronic computer technologies, global accessibility and interactivity are core characteristics of the Internet. Moreover, the Internet functions without a central governing body, with different autonomous networks being voluntarily interconnected.

The Internet emerged from early computer networks developed in the 1960s, such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET; e.g., Leiner et al., 1997). These communication networks were expanded to the 1980s in order to provide efficient communication for science and military needs. For instance, based on the ARPANET, the first email was sent 1971, and the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) specification was defined in 1973. However, the birth of the Internet as we know it today can be dated in 1990 when the ARPANET was opened for commercial usage. This was followed quickly by the first web page in 1991, and the first live stream (of a lab coffee pot) in 1993 (Trojan Room coffee pot, n.d., retrieved November 15, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot). In addition, early forms of crowdsourcing started at that time, such as the Linux operating system software development project, one of the most successful Open Source software development projects. Open Source projects such as Linux, which had no strong financial incentives or organizational structures, demonstrated the potential of collaborative work via the Internet (e.g., Hertel, Niedner, & Herrmann, 2003; Saxena, Deodhar, & Ruohonen, 2017).

In 1995, the Internet was globally commercialized, and Internet‐based (e‐commerce) enterprises such as eBay and Amazon were founded. In the remaining years of the twentieth century, there was tremendous excitement about Internet‐related businesses, with pundits predicting that brick and mortar stores would be replaced by click‐and‐order markets. This development led to an exploding stock market, and ultimately to the so‐called “dotcom crisis” in 2000, when the hype surrounding Internet businesses finally burst, with many early e‐commerce innovators becoming bankrupt. Following this hype‐and‐bust cycle, Internet‐based e‐commerce stabilized and set the stage for further, more solid developments (e.g., Fenn & Raskino, 2008). In addition, new developments in multimedia and collaboration tools emerged in the mid‐2000s that allowed for individuals to not only consume content but to also interactively and collaboratively create new content (“Web 2.0”). Wikipedia and other knowledge communities expanded on the idea of crowdwork, from rather specialized communities such as software developers in Open Source software projects, to the whole population (e.g., Schroer & Hertel, 2009). Moreover, social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Viadeo, and Skype supported both organizational and non‐organizational communities to develop around common interests. The introduction of Internet‐connected mobile “smart” phones (e.g., the first Apple iPhone in 2007) was a major step towards permanent accessibility at work, allowing users to not only make phone calls but to also access emails, webpages, and Internet‐based data files. Somewhat ironically, the first email‐free workday was also introduced in 2007 in some companies as a result of workers' reactions towards the high number of emails to be attended every day.

Only a few years later, the idea of Internet‐based collaboration was picked up by commercial or semi‐commercial initiatives in so‐called “sharing” communities, providing new services for transportation (Uber), housing (Airbnb), or labor leasing (Amazon Mechanical Turk). Notably, workers and service providers in these communities often lack conventional labor rights protection and insurances, raising various legal and ethical questions with these new conceptualizations of work.

More recently, the increasing use of sensor technologies has enabled again a new level of interactivity of the Internet, including direct connections between artifacts and machines (“Internet‐of‐Things”), which has further increased the speed of work and commerce. Although automatic driving, smart clothes, and smart offices provide many facilitations at work, these innovations can also cause risks and strain, and have been accused of destroying workplaces in various industries. For instance, use of the global positioning system (GPS) in monitoring in transportation businesses, while facilitating logistics and security issues, also puts pressure and strain on drivers, and automatic driving might even replace human drivers. Moreover, artificial intelligence might substitute important leadership tasks such as decision making in complex scenarios (Parry, Cohen, & Bhattacharya, 2016). Thus, Internet‐based innovations at work come both with opportunities and challenges for the individual worker, for work organizations, and for societies (Cascio & Montealegre, 2016; Stone & Dulebohn, 2016).

We do not know exactly what will come next. One of the exciting aspects of doing research in this field is the innovative potential of the Internet for work and work organization over the coming decades. New technologies, tools, and business ideas are continually invented, some being picked up immediately, some only after a delay of months or even years, and some perhaps never. However, in order to understand the implications of the Internet at work, it might be useful to abstract from discrete tools and phenomena, and reconsider basic characteristics of the Internet from a task‐oriented perspective.

Core Characteristics of Internet‐Based Work

Internet‐based work has been associated with many different attributes, for instance with high team diversity (e.g., Hoch & Kozlowski, 2014) or more autonomy at work (e.g., Gajendran & Harrison, 2007). However, some of these attributes are less central to or not unique for Internet‐based work in general. Based on the definition of the Internet as a global system of interconnected computer systems, we consider the following characteristics of Internet‐based work as most central and distinct from traditional work forms: accessibility, interactivity, reprocessability, automatization, and boundary crossing.

• Accessibility of information. Connecting billions of autonomous computers throughout the world (with numbers still growing), the Internet provides easy and often un‐delayed access to myriads of data both within organizational networks and beyond. In addition to increasing speed and amount of information available for work processes and decisions, high accessibility of information also supports the mobility of work because information (and people as information carriers) is neither restricted to certain locations nor to certain hours or days. Working “anywhere and anytime” has been made possible by this high level of information accessibility. However, this development has also increased the expectation that workers are accessible regardless of time or location. In fact, ubiquity has emerged as a major stressor at work, blurring traditional forms of separation between occupat...