Designing Work Within and Between Organizations

TLDR

Work design is a central, evolving challenge that shapes daily work for all employees worldwide and increasingly spans across organizational and national boundaries. The study urges a renewed research focus on work design to address emerging challenges. They propose a configuration‑based framework that defines work system boundaries, examines hierarchical nesting across and within organizations, and uses frontier analysis to identify equifinal designs. Longitudinal application of these methods reveals how work systems adapt over time, allowing prediction of performance changes across fitness landscapes.

Abstract

The design of work has been and will continue to be a central problem challenging organization theory and practice. The system of arrangements and procedures for doing work affects all workers every day throughout the world. Work is changing dramatically. In an increasingly global and knowledge-intensive economy, work design is no longer contained within an organization; it often transcends the boundaries of organizations and countries. These changes call for a renewed research focus on work design. Building on configuration and complexity perspectives, we propose a framework for studying work design. We argue that three issues require attention to advance the knowledge of work design: (1) defining the boundaries of work systems, (2) examining how the system is nested in a hierarchy within and between organizations, and (3) determining interactions between the elements of a work system. We propose a method of frontier analysis for identifying equifinal designs—the set of equally effective work designs for different combinations of inputs (situations or contexts) and outputs (performance criteria). When work designs are examined longitudinally, these methods permit an examination of adaptation processes on changing fitness landscapes, suggesting how work systems may increase, decrease, or sustain their relative performance over time.