Organization Design Challenges

Implications for scholars

Some of the practitioner challenges identified in our study have been described in the general literature on management and organizations, for example, in the literature on decision-making processes, client-consultant interaction, and organizational change.

However, there is little exploration of the design process in the organization design literature. Snow listed all of the articles published in the Journal of Organizational Design since its inception in 2012 until mid-2018. The majority of the articles are theory-driven. He identified only one article that was concerned with the design process. It seems obvious to us, however, that the design process should be a key research topic. One opportunity would be more fine-grained, descriptive research. Our study covers the main phases of a redesign project at a fairly high level. This means that we may have ignored some more detailed elements within each phase that may in fact be important for the overall outcome. A second opportunity is to consider the effectiveness of alternative tools and approaches. Organization design is a relatively immature field that is highly dependent on the skills of the individual practitioner. Many alternative tools and methods are in use, and it is unlikely that they are equally effective.