TECHNOLOGY-DRIVEN WORK ENVIRONMENTS: AN ATTRIBUTIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON EMPLOYEES¿ WELL-BEING

This dissertation adopted attribution theory to explore the relationship between employees’ interpretations of technology-driven work configurations and their well-being. Overall, this thesis is composed of three, highly interrelated studies, one review study and two empirical ones. In the review study, I explored the application of attribution theory in studying employee reactions to workplace digitalization. The main findings suggest that two streams of attribution theory (i.e. causal attributions and attribution of intent) have been adopted in the multidisciplinary literature that characterize this topic. Moreover, this first study provides evidence of how attribution theory contributes to explaining employees’ different responses to digitalized work environments. Being this dissertation developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, in Chapters II and III I shifted my research focus from workplace digitalization to technology-mediated work configurations, such as remote work. For this reason, both studies are focused on the effects of employees’ attributions concerning remote work on work-related well-being and mental health. The findings of both studies confirm a positive relationship between benevolent attributions (i.e. employees' perception that remote work is introduced to increase their well-being) concerning remote work and work-related well-being indicators as well as mental health. On the contrary, a negative association is found between malevolent attributions (i.e. employees perception that remote work is introduced to exploit them) and work-related well-being as well as mental health indicators. This thesis contributes theoretically to Human Resource (HR) attribution literature by adopting an alternative conceptualization of individuals’ attributions with respect to dominant research in this area. Indeed, in Chapter II the concept of environmental-centric attributions is introduced, while in Chapter III I have proposed the concept of stakeholder and shareholder-centric attributions. Moreover, in the empirical studies, I have adopted a two-wave design which represents an advancement with respect to cross-sectional, which is the dominant design in this field. This dissertation offers valuable insights to companies struggling to define technology-mediated work configurations that can effectively balance diverse stakeholders' demands and preserve individuals' well-being.