Technological Progress, Organizational Change and the Size of the Human Resources Departement

Raouf Boucekkine (), Patricia Crifo and Mattalia Claudio

No 2007047, Discussion Papers (ECON - Département des Sciences Economiques) from Université catholique de Louvain, Département des Sciences Economiques

Abstract: Innovative workplace practices based on multi-tasking and ICT that have been diffusing in most OECD countries since the 1990s have strong consequences on working conditions. Available data show together with the emergence of new organizational forms like multi-tasking, the increase in the proportion of workers employed in managerial occupation and the increase in skill requirements. This paper proposes a theoretical model to analyze the coordination costs between workers and between tasks. Firms can reduce coordination costs by assigning more workers to human resources management. Human capital is endogenously accumulated by workers. The model reproduces pretty well the regularities observed in the data. In particular, exogenous technological accelerations tend to increase both the number of tasks performerd and the skill requirements, and to raise the fraction of workers devoted to management.

Keywords: Information Technology; Organizational Change; Human Capital; Multi-Tasking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C62 J22 J24 L23 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37
Date: 2007-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://sites.uclouvain.be/econ/DP/IRES/2007-47.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Technological progress, organizational change and the size of the Human Resources Department (2008)
Working Paper: Technological Progress, Organizational Change and the Size of the Human Resources Department (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ctl:louvec:2007047

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers (ECON - Département des Sciences Economiques) from Université catholique de Louvain, Département des Sciences Economiques Place Montesquieu 3, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Virginie LEBLANC ().