Digitalization, Workplace Organization, and Job Transformation: A Multi-Level Analysis

Digital technologies have created new opportunities to enhance business processes and improve firm performance (Kohli and Melville 2019). At the same time, digital technologies raise challenges for organizations as they are required to prepare for significant transformation of work that digital technologies are bringing. More specifically to entrepreneurships, digitalization is creating new affordances that affect the organizational economic activities (Autio et al. 2018; Nambisan et al. 2017). It promotes decoupling between form and function, promotes disintermediationreducing the power of middleman in value chains, and drives generativityenabling the coordination of geographically dispersed audiences and opening new ways to build organizational capabilities (Autio et al. 2018). However, it is currently unknown how digitalization shifts or couples with different elements of entrepreneurial ecosystemsnamely skilled workers, work environment, and the existing systems within an organization create new business value. The goal of our research project is to examine the dynamic interaction between digitalization and entrepreneurship ecosystems. We aim to address the following research questions: 1. What are the elements of digitalization that facilitate or hinder innovation within an organization? 2. How does digitalization change the entrepreneurial ecosystems (i.e., job characteristics, information sharing capability, work environment)? 3. Under what conditions will digitalization complement already established organizational capabilities to advance innovation and organizational outcomes? We will draw upon technology affordance and constraints theory (Gibson 1979; Leonardi 2011; Majchrzak and Markus 2013; Markus and Silver 2008) to gain a deeper understanding on how digital technologies influence different organizational outcomes.