Coordinating minds and behaviors in the shop floor

Despite more than a hundred years of research on work design, many jobs remain poorly designed. Therefore, the question of how to design good work is still relevant, especially today that significant technological advances, societal changes, and disruptive events are reshaping how work is done. The present Ph.D. dissertation consists of three studies which aim at enhancing our understandings about how organizations can create competitive advantage through work design improvements. The first study examines work design from a resource allocation perspective. An agent-based simulation is developed to explain the allocation of human resources under problems of coordinated exploration, where both exploration and integration among agents’ actions are essential to achieve jointly attractive outcomes. The second study examines work design from an organizational cognition perspective. Survey data are employed to investigate whether and to which extent shared cognition affects employee’s proactivity, and how the latter reflects on team operating effectiveness. The third study recognizes that shared cognition does not necessarily mean that team member’s perceptions about their tasks are accurate and employs survey data to examine how work design can support employees to develop accurate perceptions about their job.