Technology-Driven Skill Degradation and Organizational Resilience in the Era of Automation and AI: An Integrated Systematic Review and Research Agenda

Abstract

As organizations increasingly rely on automation and AI-enabled technology, technology failures and disruptions can cascade into operational breakdowns when technology-driven skill degradation (TDSD) erodes employees' essential skills for effective workarounds that enable resilient processes. We build on the skill obsolescence and deskilling literature to delineate TDSD, which we define as the depreciation of still-required essential skills caused by sustained reliance on technology. Although skill degradation has long been studied, its manifestation in progressively technology-enabled environments introduces increasingly complex mechanisms, including substitution, automation bias, and feedback attenuation. These mechanisms drive risks that demand systematic analysis and actionable guidance. We conduct an integrated systematic literature review across disparate research streams to understand the current state of research and to synthesize evidence on drivers, mechanisms, contexts, and outcomes of TDSD in organizational settings. We synthesize a peer-reviewed corpus to integrate fragmented evidence. We use a sociotechnical lens to articulate how technology deployments interact with organizational routines to degrade cognitive, manual, and interpersonal skills. Our study concludes with a research agenda and offers practical guiding principles for organizations to manage the risk of TDSD. We contribute a precise specification of TDSD, a sociotechnical synthesis that integrates fragmented evidence across research streams, and a five-pronged research agenda with practical implications for managing TDSD.