Abstract
Development of wearable mental workload (MWL) measures thrives, especially as leveraged by Industry 4.0. When employees object to wearing such gauges; however, research efforts might end up redundant. Based on self-determination and communication theories, this study assumed that employees’ acceptability of wearable MWL-monitoring is shaped by framing characteristics in corporate communication. Specifically, we hypothesized that acceptability depends on how (1) the technology’s goals and (2) context of implementation is framed. A pilot study (N = 150) revealed that framing wearable MWL-monitoring in terms of serving intrinsic goals (e.g., improving health) in an autonomy-supportive context (e.g., allowing discussion) induced a higher employee acceptability, compared to framing the technology in terms of serving extrinsic goals (e.g., increasing productivity) in a controlling context (e.g., mandating use). A subsequent pre-registered study (N = 350) could, however, not replicate this result. Instead, higher acceptability was associated with higher technology readiness, lower education levels, and being a woman (for the trust component of acceptability). Independent of conditions, mean acceptability, interestingly, panned out neutral. The current work is thereby the first exploring the complexities of employee acceptability of wearable MWL-monitoring and, based on open-ended questions, finally suggests that privacy management might be the most pivotal explanatory variable.
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Notes
Note that we also explored for and found an effect on the first two components for people recruited from a living labs database as compared to other sources, B = 0.34, p < 0.01 and B = 0.27, p < 0.05, respectively. It is however too far-fetched to draw conclusions based on a potential different composition of these samples based on the data we have.
For our principal component analysis, we used Joliffe’s cut-off of eigenvalues higher than 0.7 to determine the appropriate number of acceptability components, 3 in our case. Using the more restrictive cut-off of eigenvalues higher than 1, we also repeated our regression with a single overarching acceptability factor as found in the Pilot Study. This result confirms the association between technology readiness (B = 0.03, p < 0.01) and education (B = -0.48, p < 0.01) on overall Emplpyee Acceptability. However, and again, no effect of our five experimental conditions reached statistical significance..
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This work was supported by the strategic research centre for the manufacturing industry Flanders Make, Oude Diestersebaan, 133, 3920 Lommel, Belgium, as part of the SBO project ‘Augmented workers using smart robots in a manufacturing cell (Yves)’.
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Appendix A: Screenshot of the pre-registration for this project. See registration date: 2018-02-08
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Van Acker, B.B., Conradie, P.D., Vlerick, P. et al. Employee acceptability of wearable mental workload monitoring: exploring effects of framing the goal and context in corporate communication. Cogn Tech Work 23, 537–552 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-020-00633-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-020-00633-0