The symbiotic relationship between digital transformation and renewed employee empowerment in the industrial sector: a case study

Résumé En Fr

At the same time as digital transformation is reshaping industrial processes, many calls for new development of empowerment are being made. Over the last few decades, empowerment has been at the heart of lean manufacturing processes and has now the opportunity to be renewed in the era of digital transformation. How do the interactions between digital transformation and empowerment manifest themselves in work situations embedded in industrial processes? In what ways is empowerment renewed in a context of digitalisation of industrial processes? And what are the implications of all this for human resources management?To answer these questions, this article explores the relationship between digitalisation and empowerment in an industrial context. It is based on a brief literature review and presents a case study of Michelin, focusing on seven work situations encountered in one of the company’s Chinese plants. The ongoing transformation is characterised by a desire to reconcile digitalisation and empowerment, in an approach defined as symbiotic.As a result, complements to the symbiotic approach are proposed, as well as a renewed symbiotic approach to empowerment in the digital era and fresh perspectives for HRM are opened.

La transformation digitale remodèle les processus industriels. De manière concomitante, de nombreux appels à un nouveau développement de l’empowerment des salariés sont lancés. Au cours des dernières décennies, l’ empowerment a été au cœur des processus industriels et a maintenant l’opportunité d’être renouvelé à l’ère de la transformation digitale. Comment les interactions entre la transformation digitale et l’empowerment se manifestent-elles dans les situations de travail ? De quelles manières l’empowerment est-il renouvelé dans un contexte de digitalisation des processus industriels ? Et quelles sont les implications de tout cela pour la gestion des ressources humaines ?