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This chapter reports on a longitudinal quasi-experimental field study within an organizational design of a global consumer products manufacturer moving toward high-performance work systems (HPWSs) in North America by integrating business centers and self-directed work teams (SDWTs) coupled with 13 other action-levers within an integrated and bundled high-performance organizations (HPOs) re-design. The results of this organizational design effort are assessed using different types and levels of organizational outcomes (hard record data, behavioral, and attitudinal measures) along a 5-year temporal dimension punctuated by multiple time periods (baseline, during, and after). The organization, which was “built to change” (Lawler & Worley, 2006), in this research had already highly superior or “exemplar” (Collins, 2001) levels of organizational performance. Consequently, the real research question becomes: “What effect does state of the art organizational design and development have on an exemplar organization?” The study also calls into question the field's ability to truly assess exemplar organizations with existing measures of organizational change and development.

High-involvement work processes (HIWPs) are associated with high levels of employee influence over the work process, such as high levels of control over how to handle individual job tasks or a high level of involvement at team or workplace level in designing work procedures. When implementations of HIWPs are accompanied by companion investments in human capital – for example, in better information and training, higher pay and stronger employee voice – it is appropriate to talk not only of HIWPs but of “high-involvement work systems” (HIWSs). This chapter reviews the theory and practice of HIWPs and HIWSs. Across a range of academic perspectives and societies, it has regularly been argued that steps to enhance employee involvement in decision-making create better opportunities to perform, better utilization of skill and human potential, and better employee motivation, leading, in turn, to various improvements in organizational and employee outcomes.

However, there are also costs to increased employee involvement and the authors review the important economic and sociopolitical contingencies that help to explain the incidence or distribution of HIWPs and HIWSs. The authors also review the research on the outcomes of higher employee involvement for firms and workers, discuss the quality of the research methods used, and consider the tensions with which the model is associated. This chapter concludes with an outline of the research agenda, envisaging an ongoing role for both quantitative and qualitative studies. Without ignoring the difficulties involved, the authors argue, from the societal perspective, that the high-involvement pathway should be considered one of the most important vectors available to improve the quality of work and employee well-being.

The digital transformation calls for new thinking about sociotechnical systems design (STSD) because it has enabled new kinds of work systems to proliferate. We identify a new class of sociotechnical system, called the Platform-STS (P-STS), which complements the existing Industrial- and Knowledge-STSs. The P-STS has distinctive characteristics compared to the other classes because it reaches directly into ecosystems and is, therefore, “distributed,” and because it is governed through market mechanisms rather than hierarchy or clan mechanisms. We introduce a new design principle, redundancy of connectivity, to ground design thinking about the P-STS. We demonstrate why fundamental STSD principles need to be reconfigured, suggest how they might do so, and conclude that socioecological designs and interventions may need to supplant sociotechnical ones.

The design of work has been shown to influence a host of attitudinal, behavioral, cognitive, well-being, and organizational outcomes. Despite its clear importance, scholarly interest in the topic has diminished over the past 20 years. Fortunately, a recent body of research has sought to reenergize research into work design by expanding our view of work design from a narrow set of motivational work features to one that incorporates broader social and contextual elements. In this chapter we seek to review the literature on work design and develop a framework that integrates both job and team design research. We begin by briefly reviewing the history of work design in order to provide needed historical context and illustrate the evolution of job and team design. We then define work design, particularly as it relates to incorporating job and team design elements and transitioning from a view of jobs to one of roles. Following this, we identify a comprehensive set of work design outcomes that provide the basis for understanding the impact that different work characteristics can have on individuals and teams. We then offer an extended discussion of our integrative model of work design, which includes three sources of work characteristics (task, social, and contextual) and the worker characteristics implied by these characteristics. Having defined the range of work and worker characteristics, we then discuss some of the fit and composition issues that arise when designing work, as well as discuss the mechanisms through which the work characteristics have their impact on outcomes. Finally, we discuss research into informal forms of work design.

Organizations rely on budget teams for capital investment decisions. This study examined conditions that affected budget team performance. Variables included the formulation of cooperative, competitive and independent team budget goals and the mediating effect of budget information analysis between goals and budget performance. Two antecedents to budget goal formulation were examined, the budget knowledge of individual team members and organizational feedback control. Posited hypotheses were supported. Asymmetric budget knowledge between team members significantly increased independent and competitive budget goals and decreased cooperative budget goals. Organizational controls discouraged independent and competitive goals and encouraged cooperative budget goals. Cooperative (competitive and independent) budget goals improved (hindered) budget information analysis that in turn positively (negatively) affected budget performance.

Organizational creativity and innovation are inherently complex phenomena, and subject to a myriad of broad contextual and social influences. As the evidence grows for the link between innovation and organizational effectiveness and, ultimately, organizational survival, there is no doubting the need for theoretical and practical advances in our understanding. The complex nature of these constructs, however, requires that such efforts utilize a multi-level lens. This chapter discusses key aspects of creativity and innovation in organizations, including fundamental construct definition issues, which underscore the need for a multi-level perspective. It also reviews extant theoretical perspectives for their contributions to a multi-level understanding, and the research in two key areas of social influence – group factors and leadership – that have received substantial attention in the organizational literature. The review and discussion of these areas reveal not only numerous advances, but also substantial limitations that must be resolved through more complex and comprehensive (i.e., multi-level) approaches. The chapter concludes with several recommendations intended to guide and inform future work in the organizational creativity and innovation field.

This chapter examines the ecotopian activist tradition through an exploration of existing literature, within a context of the processes of activism, identity and place which arise from the communitarian impulse. The initial part of the chapter sets out utopian communitarianism into separate phases. Each phase is examined for the exogenous and internalised motivations that compel people in different eras to participate in intentional living projects be they religious, autonomous, or environmental. The chapter develops these themes further by applying Sargisson's study of intentional communities to the discussion. The chapter attempts to ground this discussion within the context of the wider understandings of green utopian practice, such as Barry's ‘Concrete Utopian’ realism or de Geus's ‘utopia of sufficiency’.