Works
- Selective intervention and internal hybrids: interpreting and learning from the rise and decline of the Oticon spaghetti organization, Organization Science 14(3), 331 to 349, 2003
- Valve's way: wayward, visionary, or voguish?, Journal of Organization Design 4(2), 12 to 15, 2015
- Problem-formulation and problem-solving in self-organized communities: how modes of communication shape project behaviors in the free open-source software community, Strategic Management Journal 37(13), 2589 to 2610, 2016
- The interaction of control systems and stakeholder networks in shaping the identities of self-managed teams, Organization Studies 38(5), 619 to 645, 2017
- When agile harms learning and innovation: (and what can be done about it), California Management Review 63(1), 61 to 80, 2020
- Why Managers Matter: The Perils of the Bossless Company, PublicAffairs, New York (320 pages), 2022
In Organizational Structures
Known for
The organizational economics of delegation and hierarchy
Ideas
Selective intervention and internal hybrids. Radical internal hybrids such as Oticon's spaghetti organization are hard to design and sustain because managers cannot credibly commit not to intervene in delegated decisions; at Oticon, frequent managerial meddling led to a severe loss of motivation and arguably caused the change, about a decade later, to a more traditional matrix organization. Caveat: One firm; refutable implications are developed, not tested. Read in its abstract only.
Why managers matter. With Klein, Foss argues that authority and hierarchy are needed to coordinate work, creative work included, and that bossless fads often backfire. Caveat: A book-length argument; Martela (2019) takes the opposite view, that self-managing organizations are a novel form, especially viable where interdependence between units is low, outputs are highly tailored, and employee expertise and motivation are high.
Communication modes in self-organized communities. With Frederiksen and Rullani, found that unstructured communication goes with launching new open source projects and artifact-structured communication with joining existing ones. Caveat: Associations in one community's data.
In this section, “read” means read by the Organizational Structures series: where a line says a work, or part of one, was not read, the series did not read it.