How can industrial work be redesigned to support employee well‑being, autonomy, and learning, and not just efficiency? In her doctoral thesis, Elin Edén shows how everyday work is constantly reshaped in the tension between formal structures and human initiative, with concrete consequences for both people and production. Building on these insights, the research clarifies what human‑centric manufacturing means in practice for frontline managers, operators, and their organisations.
What challenges do you focus on in your research?
“I focus on the challenge of making increasingly automated and digitally supported industrial production more human‑centric without sacrificing efficiency. In today’s factories, work is expected to be tightly controlled by systems while simultaneously being motivating and developmental for employees. However, in practice, frontline managers are often caught between pressure for speed and quality and the need to create space for learning and development on the shop floor. I also show that well‑intended upskilling can have an unintended side effect: when employees become more skilled, they are quickly recruited to other positions, and the teams they leave behind lose stability.”
How do you address the problem?
“I address the problem by studying work in production at three levels: individual, team, and organisation. To improve operator work, this research evaluated an intervention introducing multiskilled teams where workers take on specialist roles. I use a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to understand work design and follow how these changes play out in practice.”
What are the main findings?
“My research shows how frontline managers in factories spend much of their time handling a mismatch between how work is designed on paper and what is needed in daily operations. They constantly re‑prioritise, deal with disturbances, and pick up tasks that fall between functions to keep production running. This works in the short term but also makes the underlying work design look more sustainable than it really is.”
“I also show that the way industrial jobs are designed has clear consequences for how people feel at work and how stable production teams become. When jobs offer room for influence, problem solving, and using one’s skills with others, employees report less stress, greater satisfaction, and better opportunities to learn. In interventions with multiskilled production teams and specialist roles, operator jobs became more stimulating and learning‑oriented, but some teams also became harder to keep stable when the most skilled operators were quickly recruited to other roles.”
What do you hope your research will lead to?
“I hope my research encourages manufacturing companies to see work in production as something that is co-constructed – not only prescribed from above or driven by short-term fixes on the shop floor. More concretely, I want to support companies in designing clear structures for responsibility, learning, and internal mobility, so that managers and operators do not have to constantly compensate for system shortcomings through extra informal work. In the long run, I hope this will contribute to factories where human competence, motivation, and opportunities for learning are treated as strategic assets in production, not as leftovers once everything else has been planned.”
Read the thesis: Co-Constructed Work Design in Production: Toward Realizing Human-Centric Operations
Public defence: 25 May 2026 at 13:15
Supervisor
- Professor, Entrepreneurship and Strategy, Technology Management and Economics