Adoption of Technological Innovation

Emerging technologies are infiltrating every facet of our lives. These technologies are contributing to the globalization of world, becoming intrinsic for HR employees. Technology makes everything easier, less expensive and creating formidable new changes for employees and organization. Innovation and Technology is always in flux, always opening or about to open new doors. Theresearch question this study pursues is, how technology and innovation has become vital for HR employees to adopt in terms of improving and maintaining performance management and employee development.

The findings of this paper investigate the impact of technology and innovation on performance management and employee development.

Innovation has been defined as a “process to change an idea or technique into a new product or service that creates value for the customers”.Technological Innovations are changes to or completely new releases of technology, and process improvements to research and development (R&D).(Yasini, 2016).

As organizations came forward to 21st century, there was an interesting change in technology which affected work environment and employee’s behavior.

People were focusing towards implementing innovative techniques in different departments and functions. Now, today’s environment is full of ambiguities, market challenges, changing workforce demographics, social and political pressures and not least of all, technology is constantly changing the world. It is changing the capacity to generate more information, faster more interdepencies that people can manage, and accelerating the changes fast than person’s ability. (Miller, Bex, 2005).

Contemporary World of Technology

In the contemporary world of technology, advancement continues to accelerate the future.

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This technological advancement changes the organizational policies and strategies. (Hampel &Martinsons, 2009). Most of the challenges in organizations are generated by advanced technology, competition, enhancing employee efficiency, rapid growth, new leadership and management. (Madsen et. Al, 2005).The employees in most of the firms are involved in management and working for implementation of technological advancement. For improving the employee’s knowledge and skills and development prior to the introduction of new technology, many of the firms invested on employees. The employees who worked under both the old and new systems have expressed less positive attitudes about their jobs and this behavior circulated to the organization because it seems more likely to leave and less committed. So, the firms must motivate the employees for the adoption of new technology and give incentives in order to improve their performance. (Dauda &Akingbade, 2011).

The latest technological trends have improved the rapid information exchange and analyzability. Due to this, scope for the individual employee level development increases and employees become more system orientated. A combination of strategy and technology has an impact on the employee relations. A large number of studies report a positive impact of technological innovation on labour productivity. (Crepon et al., 1998; Loof et al., 2003; Janz et al., 2004; Criscuolo, 2009; Mairesse et al., 2012; Hashi and Stojcic, 2013), profitability (Jefferson et al., 2006; Lööf and Heshmati, 2006), firm growth (Coad and Rao, 2008),openness (Kleinknecht and Oostendorp, 2002; Lachenmaier and Woessmann, 2006) and other firm level outcomes.The progressive introduction of improvements in information, robotics, telecommunications and telematic technologies is a common phenomenon. These developments involve new opportunities to improve the processes of organizations and labour life equality in companies. (Child & Loveridge, 1990; Walton, 1989).

Technological Advancement and Employee Performance

Technological advancement is the process of combining and reorganizing knowledge to generate new ideas. The development of technology has an impact on firm performannce(Mumford, 2000). Technological advancement comes from internal advancement and internal advancement comes from employee capability. So, there is a close relationship between technological advancement and employee performance. (Huselid, 1995).

Adoption of Technology

Implementing new methods, guidelines, or tools into routine care is a slow process and the factors that play a role in the change process are not yet fully understood. (Carlfjord S, Lindberg M, 2010).To introduce a new system is time taken process, there may be resistance from managers and practitioners. Following are the four steps followed in the adoption of technology: –

Technologies has its pros and cons, so it is impossible to summarize the impact of technology in maintaining performance management and its role in employee development. Comment by [email protected]:

Technology’s Impact on Increasing Productivity and Improving Performance

Technological innovation results in increasing productivity and improving performance when it is combined with the other resources and when it is done effectively, used ethically and productively. (Dauda &Akingbade, 2011). Firm improvement is also enhanced by technological advancement. (Li and Deng, 1999). Employee performance is enormously influenced by technological innovation;therefore, it is an important factor which has a great impact inn performance management. (Hitt et al., 1997). Most of studies have shown a positive relationship between technological innovation andperformance management, by concluding that technological innovation is important for employee performance. (Foster, 1986).

In the past decades, organizations are delivering the training programs to their employees because of its beneficiary effects such as cost reduction in travelling and training, flexibility in pace and delivery of training and boost worker productivity. (Ozturan and Kutlu 2010). Based on the Zhang , Ordonez de Pablos, and Zhang (2012) and Zhang, Ordonez de Pablos, and Zhu findings, IT capabilities of virtual world are generally related to users’ digital options, and then improve the individual and knowledge work of team.

Technology in HR has created a new way of HR processes application which helped alot. This application in HR includes virtual recruitment, E-learning and self-services HR. (Gardner, Lepak and Bartol,2003). Now-a-days all the processes of HR have changed due to technological advancement. This has removed all the obstacles and barriers. (Hendrickson,2003). In this era of technology, trainers are working directly with new staff through information technology. Through this technology, HR managers are comparing the actual performance of employees with the standard performance. This process removes the differences and these managers suggest additional training if needed based on this performance. HR managers store and retrieve all the files of organizations in an electronic format. It has helped in reducing the administrative expenses and improve the decision-making process. It also brings an improvement to organizations.

The success of an organization is heavily dependent on the performance of human assets. (Lippert,2005). Innovation adoption decision varies from organization to organization depending upon cultural, environmental, cultural and technological features. (Fichman,2004). According to the Survey conducted by CPID (Chartered Institute of Personnel Development), 77% of the organizations responded that they use technological advancement in managing their human resource and 51% of the organizations reported that they use technological innovation in the processes of recruitment and for selection purposes. (Martin G,2005).

New technical, information and communication technologies and the workforce changes associated with them can support and drive innovative work processes and have an impact on productivity and efficiency.

Technology and Task-Shifting

Task-shifting involves “giving any task or work to existing or new cadres with less training and less experience.”Due to the technological advancement, different grades of staff take different duties. Senior people may no longer be needed if technology aids in doing certain tasks. Task shifting has been made possible through the technology and innovation which helped the employee doing different tasks even if they are less-experienced. (Fulton BD,2005).

Technology and Staff-Reduction

Technology and innovation have cut down the number of staff needed to perform tasks, freeing up the capacity to use skilled staff. Researches have suggested that the new technology can free up the staff capacity, increasing the job satisfaction through better communication and enhance role responsibilities by giving the opportunity of new task to different grades of staff and by doing this through technology. In the US, an automated interactive system was introduced to respond to selected calls to a poison center. It did the job of four full time staff members. New technology in this way has become more efficient and becoming more effective alternative. Combining new technologies with other system redesign elements and strong leadership may be more beneficial. (Burke D, Brooks R, 2005)

Consequences

Technological Innovation has consequences on labor-related areas as job performance, labour life quality, attitudes about training, the meaning of work and motivation, psychological wellbeing, interpersonal relations, organizational structure, management of people, organizational effectiveness, organizational climate and culture.

This study shows that employee development and performance management are greatly influenced by technological advancement. Basically, I have taken four variables; training, motivation and employee performance as dependent variable and technological advancement as independent variable. It has been observed that technological advancement has positive relationship with these three variables. If we increase the technological advancement factor, there will be positive change in motivation, training and employee performance. These results indicated that itshould not be “nice to have” but it “must have” and this innovative activity should not be reduced in the organizations. The company should consider itself lucky for having employees that are passionate about technology and innovation since it may lead to productivity enhancement. (Rostami & Branch,2011).