Technology use at Work And Innovative work practices: Assessing the impact on work environment, employees' motivations and effort in Luxembourg

In the context of the advent of the knowledge-oriented society, the diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) within firms strengthens the acquisition and the transfer of information and knowledge between employees. The diffusion of these technologies associated with new work models (such as decentralization of decision-making or teamwork) are supposed to increase firms' performance.
The key economic problem for firms, in this context, is to built a compensation system and provide a motivating work environment to favour the optimal diffusion of information and knowledge that should, in turn, result in productivity gains. This motivating work environment can also allow firms to retain motivates and skilled workers. Thus, it increases the profits and decreases the costs due to labour turnover (relating to the recruitment and training of new workers).
The TWAIN project aims to assess the impact of technological and organizational changes on employees' motivations, level of effort, and intent to leave. By focusing on the specific, multinational labour market of Luxembourg, the project will take into account, among others, language and cultural differences that relate to the way in which employees perceive their work environment and the characteristics of the management in their firms. The overall methodological framework of this project relies on econometric analyses of two sources of data coming from a survey and from experimental economics.
Three main research topics are analyzed in the TWAIN project: (i) the consequences of ICT use and new work models on employees' motivations that are intended to reinforce their effort and their willingness to stay in the firm; (ii) the precise channels through which ICT use impacts on the structure of decision-making in the organization (centralization or decentralization), and beyond employee's motivations and effort; and (iii) finally the role of teamwork, one of the most prevalent new work models in firms, in order to assess how the virtualization of contacts may affect teams' outcome and also the broader issue of the firm's performance. The results will help in defining good practices in the management of employees, and in outlining the pattern of information sharing and communication that could improve firms( performance.