(in German)

Technological innovations are an integral part of our working world. In the field of industrial robotics, these include lightweight robots that can interact more closely with humans than previous systems. Due to the increasing digitalisation of production tasks, function allocation between humans and machines as well as the design of allocated tasks are again increasingly coming into focus.

In this notion, job control is a relevant task characteristic. Research form occupational psychology has shown a general positive effect of job control for employees in various work situations. However, it remains unclear, also due to strong methodological differences, whether individual facets of job control differ in their resource effect. On the one hand, there is no consistent operationalisation of the concept; on the other hand, there is a lack of precise design recommendations regarding job control in specific task domains like production tasks. Furthermore, highly standardised task in particular do not seem to be very compatible with the concept of job control. Flexible lightweight robots may possibly resolve this conflict.

The aim of this thesis is therefore to investigate the potential of innovative assistance systems for the design job control as a key feature in workplace design, in semi-automated assembly tasks. Specifically, this is done using the example of human-robot interaction. Based on the results of three employee surveys, this study presents a comprehensive description of the current state of job control for industrial production tasks in relation to various variables of mental health, also taking into account the use of robotic systems.

Based on theories and models, three job control dimensions were derived. In order to systematically analyse the influence of different job control dimensions on the psychological short-term experience of the working situation as well as the experienced human-robot interaction quality in semi-automated industrial assembly tasks, a concept-guided assembly line was developed using a robotic assistance system. The overall influence of job control as well as the individual dimensions timing control, method control and decision latitude on the short-term experience ofthe working situation and the experienced interaction quality was assessed in a laboratory experiment. As cycle times are a common feature of highly standardised productions tasks, the influence of different cycle times was also analysed.

The results show that the combination of timing control, method control and decision latitude has a positive influence on the overall experience of the working situation, however not on the experience interaction quality. Long cycle times are generally perceived more positively in assembly work. In addition, the results show that standardised assembly tasks can benefit above all from aspects related to timing control.

Please download the complete report "Job control within semi-automated production tasks: Task design using the example of human-robot interaction" (in German only).