Midway evaluation in Industrial Engineering - Helga Guðrún Óskarsdóttir

Title: Knowledge Worker Productivity

Doctoral candidate: Helga Guðrún Óskarsdóttir

Doctoral committee:

Guðmundur Valur Oddsson, Professor at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Iceland
Rögnvaldur J. Sæmundsson, Professor at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Iceland
Jón Þór Sturluson, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Business Administration, University of Iceland

Abstract

Most jobs, today, are knowledge based or at least have aspects that are dependent on working with knowledge. The workers in these jobs are called knowledge workers (KWs). KWs have high degrees of expertise, education or experience and use it to acquire, create, share or apply knowledge in their jobs. We are dependent on KWs not only to maintain and keep our economy strong but also for innovations that will change the world. There is a need for a holistic approach to explore what affects knowledge worker productivity (KWP) and how to manage and improve it. Current research addressing this problem is fragmented and deals with different isolated elements of the problem. There is a vast amount of current research in multiple research fields with a high level of detail which touches on factors that influence KWP. This makes it difficult to get a complete holistic view. The first step to a holistic approach is to identify the fundamentals of KWP by looking at the problem from a high level of abstraction. It is not enough to look at the management and improvement of KWP from the viewpoint of the organization. The viewpoint of the individual KW needs to be considered as well. The KW owns the means of production, they carry their knowledge in their heads and take it with them when changing jobs. This research attempts to find and define holistic systems, that affect the productivity of the knowledge worker (KW), using soft systems methodology and literature reviews.