Technological progress, organizational change and the size of the Human Resources Department

1 Introduction

Admittedly the recent Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) revolution
has favoured the development of numerous innovative workplace practices in most OECD
countries (see for example Osterman, 2004, for the US case, and Boucekkine and Crifo,
2007, for more recent empirical evidence for OECD countries). A view emerges as the
productivity gains from investing in ICT cannot be significant without an appropriate
evolution in the workplace organization towards more flexibility, which in turn is likely to
rise the demand for skilled labour. This view is advocated and tested for example in the
well-known paper of Bresnahan et al. (2002).

Table 1 illustrates this rising organizational flexibility following the ICT revolution.
Work organization inside firms evolved from specialization to multi-tasking, and flexible
forms of workplace organization have largely diffused in most OECD economies. For
example, the two thirds of American firms and 57% of German establishments now rely on
multi-tasking, and the proportion of workers involved in organizational changes increased
continuously (and even doubled) in Great Britain and France.

Table 1: Tasks and computer use in the EU (% of workers), 1991-2000

Source: European surveys on working conditions, European foundation for the
improvement of living and working conditions.

Parallel to this trend, we can also observe an increasing employment share of skilled
workers in ma jor OECD countries during the 1990s along with the dissemination of ICT,
as shown in Table 2 (additional evidence confirming this trend in other OECD countries
can be found in Boucekkine and Crifo, 2007).

Table 2: High-skilled (HS) ICT workers in the European Union and the United States,
Average annual employment growth (1995-01) (* = in 2001)

Source: OECD (July 2004) based on the Eurostat Labour Force Survey and the US
Current Population Survey, May 2003.

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