The rise of people analytics and the future of organizational research

Abstract

Organizations are transforming as they adopt new technologies and use new sources of data, changing the experiences of employees and pushing organizational researchers to respond. As employees perform their daily activities, they generate vast digital data. These data, when combined with established methods and new analytic techniques, create unprecedented opportunities for studying human behavior at work and have fueled the rise of people analytics as a new institutional field of practice. In this chapter, I describe the emerging field of people analytics and new organizational phenomena that accompany the use of data and algorithms. These practices are affecting how individuals, groups, and organizations function, ranging from decision-making processes and work procedures, to communication and collaboration, to attempts to monitor and control employees. In each of these domains, I describe recent research and propose new research directions. Many of these domains intersect with the emerging field of Computational Social Science, in which disciplinary scholars are applying computational methods to an expanding array of digitized data, pursuing interests that extend far into the organizational domain. Organizational scholars are well-positioned to bridge organizational and disciplinary advances to stay at the forefront of research on the future of work.