Angela Messioui

This dissertation examines how employees perceive economic and technical skills obsolescence in changing work environments and how these perceptions relate to development opportunities at work, psychological resources, work engagement, burnout, sickness absence and job insecurity. Technological and organisational developments continuously reshape job tasks, workflows and required skills. As a result, employees may perceive that their skills no longer adequately support changing job requirements. Building on the human capital literature, this dissertation distinguishes between economic and technical skills obsolescence. Economic skills obsolescence refers to the depreciation of skills due to technological and organisational change. Technical skills obsolescence reflects perceived declines in physical or mental capacities required to perform work tasks, often because of ageing, illness or prolonged non-use. The primary focus of this dissertation is on perceived economic skills obsolescence, as this form is most directly related to how employees perceive and respond to changing job requirements in contemporary workplaces. Technical skills obsolescence is examined in the context of sickness absence and job insecurity, where reduced work participation may affect employees’ perception of skills obsolescence. The theoretical framework integrates insights from the Job Demands–Resources (JD–R) model and Conservation of Resources (COR) theory. Within the JD–R framework, perceived economic skills obsolescence is conceptualised as a job demand-related experience that emerges when employees perceive increasing difficulty maintaining the value of their skills within response to changing job requirements in their jobs, while development opportunities at work operate as a key job resource. From a COR perspective, perceived economic skills obsolescence reflects the loss of valuable resources, which undermines psychological resources such as learning attitude, learning efficacy and mastery. These frameworks explain how changing work environments affect employees’ learning, motivation, health and continued participation at work. The dissertation consists of four empirical chapters. Chapter 2 examines how perceived economic skills obsolescence relates to employees’ perceptions of development opportunities at work and whether this relationship is explained by learning attitude, learning efficacy and mastery, with age as a moderator. Using longitudinal survey data from employees in the telecommunications sector, the findings show that economic skills obsolescence is both directly and indirectly related to perceived development opportunities at work. Indirect negative associations operate through learning attitude and mastery, while age strengthens the negative relationships between economic skills obsolescence and learning attitude and learning efficacy. Chapter 3 focuses on older employees and examines how perceived economic skills obsolescence relates to sickness absence frequency and duration through work engagement and burnout. Using longitudinal data from the STREAM study (TNO), which is representative of employees aged 45 years and older in the Netherlands, the findings show that economic skills obsolescence is positively related to burnout and negatively related to work engagement. These processes explain higher sickness absence frequency and longer absence duration among older employees. Chapter 4 analyses how perceived economic skills obsolescence and development opportunities at work relate to sickness absence through work engagement. Using cross-sectional survey data from a large Dutch telecommunications organisation, the results show that economic skills obsolescence is associated with higher sickness absence frequency through lower work engagement. Development opportunities at work are associated with lower perceived economic skills obsolescence, higher work engagement and fewer sickness absence episodes. Chapter 5 examines whether sickness absence contributes to job insecurity through economic and technical skills obsolescence. Using longitudinal survey data, the findings show that economic skills obsolescence mediates the relationship between sickness absence duration and job insecurity, whereas technical skills obsolescence does not. This indicates that sickness absence can initiate a resource loss process in which reduced exposure to the work environment increases perceived economic skills obsolescence and job insecurity. Across the empirical chapters, the findings show that perceived economic skills obsolescence functions as a central mechanism through which changing work environments affect employees’ learning, motivation, health and work participation, highlighting why similar workplace changes can lead to different outcomes for different employees.