Digitalization trends and industry 4.0: ensuring knowledge workers’ sustainable productivity and innovative capability

Organizations are struggling to ensure knowledge workers’ productivity and innovative capabilities to adopt rapidly changing technologies. This study investigates this under-explored topic of impediments for knowledge workers’ sustainable productivity and innovative capabilities for digitalization and adoption of Industry 4.0 and 5.0 using multi-level and multi-dimensional research approach. Using in-depth structured literature review and refined through expert evaluation, a list of impediments was developed which was further categorized at multiple levels along with cross country comparative analyses using survey data collected from IT professionals from six countries. Analytical Hierarchal Process approach is used to prioritize impediments at four levels of impediment ranking, factors ranking, categories ranking and global ranking along with country-wise analysis to explore IT professionals’ preference. Findings suggest focus areas in three dimensions - organizational, technological, and personal along with three factors of each using relative rankings based on local and global weights. The study has significant theoretical and practical implications in relation to digitalization, knowledge workers and adoption of industry 4.0 and 5.0.