Adrianto

Adrianto

PhD Candidate
Work & Organizations

Education:

  • M.Sc. 2014
    Public Policy and Management Carnegie Mellon University
  • S.E. 2007
    Management Universitas Indonesia

Biography

Adrianto completed his Bachelor's degree in Economics from Universitas Indonesia and Master's in Public Policy and Management from Carnegie Mellon University. Before entering Carlson School of Management, Adrianto had worked in a government's organizational design unit in Indonesia for ten years and conducted studies on organizational health, job and workload analysis, and organizational design. His research focuses on the effects of technology and shared capitalism on the organization of work and employee well-being.

Selected Works & Activities

  • Conference Proceedings
    Adrianto, Avner Ben-Ner, and Ainhoa Urtasun, 2023: How Things are Made Matters: The Effects of Technology on the Organization of Work. Proceedings, 2023, https://doi.org/10.5465/AMPROC.2023.14745abstract
  • Working Papers
    Adrianto, Avner Ben-Ner, Ainhoa Urtasun. (2024). The Effects of Robots on the Workplace. Working paper.
  • Working Papers
    Adrianto, Avner Ben-Ner, and Ainhoa Urtasun. (2023). How things are made matters: The effects of technology on the organization of work, Working Paper.
  • Working Papers
    Adrianto, Avner Ben-Ner, Jason Sockin, and Ainhoa Urtasun. (2023). Sharing is Caring: Employee Stock Ownership Plans and Employee Satisfaction in U.S. Manufacturing. Working Paper.
  • Journal Articles
    Adrianto & Wibowo, Buddi. (2019). Uji Empirik Strategi Struktur Modal Pecking Order pada Perusahaan-Perusahaan Non Keuangan LQ45 Bursa Efek Indonesia, Inovasi: Jurnal ekonomi, keuangan dan manajemen, 15(1), 12-25.
  • Presentations
    "Are Employee-Owned Firms Luddites? Effects of Ownership on Adoption of Robots and Employment after Adoption," Kelso Workshop, 2024.
  • Presentations
    "Who Does What? Theory and Evidence on the Effects of Technology on Division of Labor and Specialization", the Work in the Age of Intelligent Machines Conference (2022).
  • Presentations
    "Who Does What? Theory and Evidence on the Effects of Technology on Division of Labor and Specialization", Industry Studies Association Annual Conference (2022).
  • Presentations
    "Are Workers Better Off Owning The Firm?" Industry Studies Association Annual Conference (2023).
  • Presentations
    "How things are made matters: The effects of technology on the organization of work," Industry Studies Association Annual Conference (2023).
  • Presentations
    "How robotics affects employment and skills of low and high-skill workers? Evidence from U.S. manufacturing plants 2010- 2022," Industry Studies Association Annual Conference (2023).
  • Presentations
    "How things are made matters: The effects of technology on the organization of work," 83rd Academy of Management Annual Meeting (2023).
  • Are Employee-Owned Firms Luddites? Effects of Ownership on Adoption of Robots and Employment after Adoption

    with Avner Ben-Ner and Ainhoa Urtasun

    This study evaluates whether firms with Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOP) – employee-owned firms – exhibit “Luddite” opposition toward manufacturing automation adoption compared to conventional firms. Leveraging data about robot adoption between 2010-2022 for 34,000 U.S. manufacturing plants and over 8 million job postings, we use logistic regression to estimate the likelihood of adoption and difference-in-differences analysis to assess the effect of adoption on subsequent hiring of workers in various occupations among adopting and non-adopting plants.

    Results indicate that plants in employee-owned firms exhibit a significantly greater propensity to deploy industrial robots than plants in conventional firms. This contradicts the intuitive expectation that employee-owned firms will resist automation more vigorously to protect jobs. Moreover, we find that unionized conventional plants are less likely to adopt robots as compared to their non-unionized counterpart, in line with the Luddite tradition and the extremely limited empirical evidence on this matter (Noble 1986). In contrast, unions did not seem to have any effect on plants in employee-owned firms; instead, the propensity to adopt robots was even stronger when ESOPs were introduced through union-management collective bargaining agreements.  

    Empirical evidence suggests that plants that adopt robots increase the hiring of new workers in all occupations as compared to non-adopters, shift their workforce composition away from other occupations (e.g., HR, sales, and finance) towards technical occupations, and gain market share. In this study, we find that plants in conventional and employee-owned firms increase external hiring following the adoption of robots, but the effect for the latter is more limited after size differences are removed. Moreover, the compositional shift is only observed within conventional firms. Since employee-owned firms advance worker well-being (i.e., satisfaction and safety) more than conventional firms, they will share the benefits of technological upgrades with their workers more than conventional firms. Hence, our findings indicate that employee-owned firms preserve employment stability. They protect jobs by limiting new external hires in favor of incumbent workers, and therefore there will be no union or worker opposition against automation.

    In sum, contrary to “Luddite” expectations, employee-owners embrace automation because ownership affords them a voice and power to protect their interest in sustaining employment and capturing productivity returns. The presence of institutional channels for worker voice and profit-sharing enshrined in ESOP legal rules and regulations appears pivotal in realizing mutual gains from manufacturing modernization.
     

    Sharing is Caring: Employee Stock Ownership Plans and Employee Satisfaction in U.S. Manufacturing

    with Avner Ben-Ner, Jason Sockin, and Ainhoa Urtasun

    Do employees fare better in firms they partly own? By examining workers' reviews of their employers on the website Glassdoor, we offer the first expansive comparison of employee satisfaction between firms in which workers own company shares through an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) and conventional firms in which they do not. Focusing on production workers and managers in an industry-labor market matched sample within U.S. manufacturing, we find that employees report greater satisfaction in employee-owned firms overall and within specific aspects of jobs such as their firms' culture. Such differences in job quality cannot be rationalized by differences in skill demand and are greater when the ESOP is the product of collective bargaining. This work highlights how match quality can differ by ownership arrangement.

     

    The Effects of Robots on the Workplace

    with Avner Ben-Ner and Ainhoa Urtasun

    This paper examines the effects of robot adoption on employment and skills in US manufacturing plants. We develop a theoretical framework for understanding the impact of robot adoption on the workplace. Using information contained in job postings, we apply a difference-in-differences approach matched on industry and size to estimate how vacancies for various occupations and associated skill demands change after robot adoption compared to non-adopting peer plants. We find robot adoption substantially increases demand for technical workers in both high-skill jobs like engineers and lower-skill hands-on jobs like assemblers or welders. Support occupations lags behind. Converting job posting changes to employment changes suggests robots increase the employment of the adopting plant by 2.6% upon adoption, rising above 3% by the second subsequent year. Comparing effects across plant, firm, and industry levels reveals how prior industry-level studies obscure job gains for adopters. A similar but less problematic bias occurs when adoption is considered at the firm rather than plant level. Adopting plants reshape hands-on jobs away from traditional skills towards maintenance, repair, and programming of robots, whereas high-skill workers adapt existing worker capabilities to robots rather than requiring new skills. By leveraging granular job posting data, we provide credible evidence on the dominant effect of complementarity between high-skill and low-skill labor and robots, limited displacement of low-skill tasks, net gain in employment in adopters, and loss of jobs in non-adopters.

     

    How things are made matters: The effects of technology on the organization of work

    with Avner Ben-Ner and Ainhoa Urtasun

    Given a particular product to produce, firms have several alternative production technologies from which to choose. This paper examines the effect of production technologies, directly and indirectly through complexity and task interdependence, on outcomes essential to the organization of work. Our study uses online job vacancy postings in the U.S. manufacturing sector during 2017-2021 to analyze technical occupations (i.e., engineers, technicians, and operators) in plants that implement one of six primary technologies: subtraction, forming, molding, additive manufacturing, chemical, and assembly. Controlling for different forms of automation, location, and other factors, we find that the differences in the division of labor, specialization, and span of control among technologies are driven by differences in complexity. Additive manufacturing, chemical, and assembly are technologically more complex than forming, molding, and subtraction, and, as a result, they need more jobs to be designed, more tasks and skills to be bundled into a job, and fewer employees to be overseen by a manager. Moreover, each technology exhibits a distinct pattern of two forms of task interdependence—reciprocal and sequential, and therefore the effects on the three outcomes are more nuanced.

     

    You have been muted: Communication, trust, and knowledge sharing in virtual work environments

    with Christopher Winchester

    Knowledge is a vital issue for virtual teams, as limitations in mediated communication can pose a substantial obstacle to its creation and distribution. In an experimental study, we found evidence of indirect effects of relational- and task-based communication on knowledge sharing through their effects on affect- and cognition-based trust, but only in communication conducted through high-cue media. In contrast, the effects were insignificant in communication through highly virtual, low-cue media. This implies that virtual teams that interact mainly through low-cue media, such as e-mails or voice calls, but rarely in-person, can have a negative impact on knowledge creation as more frequent communication may not readily translate into higher trust, which is instrumental in promoting knowledge sharing among coworkers. In a highly virtual world brought about by the pandemic, this finding should be taken as a precaution when designing virtual work arrangements.

    • PhD Student Teaching Award, Carlson School of Management (2023)
    • The Employee Ownership Foundation/Louis O. Kelso Fellowship (2023-2024)
    • PhD Student Conference Travel Fellowship, Carlson School of Management (2022 & 2023)
    • Highest Distinction, Master of Science in Public Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon University (2014)
    • Financial Education and Training Agency (FETA) Scholarship (2020-2024)
    • Scholarship Program for Strengthening the Reforming Institution (2012-2014)

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