Works
- Renewal through reorganization: the value of inconsistencies between formal and informal organization, Organization Science 20(2), 422 to 440, 2009
- Integrating distributed work: comparing task design, communication, and tacit coordination mechanisms, Strategic Management Journal 32(8), 849 to 875, 2011
- What's "new" about new forms of organizing?, Academy of Management Review 39(2), 162 to 180, 2014
- Valve's way, Journal of Organization Design 4(2), 2 to 4, 2015
- GitHub: exploring the space between boss-less and hierarchical forms of organizing, Journal of Organization Design 6(1), 2017
- The microstructure of organizations, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2018
- Resolving governance disputes in communities: a study of software license decisions, Strategic Management Journal 41(10), 1837 to 1868, 2020
- Human-AI collaborative decision-making as an organization design problem, Journal of Organization Design 10(2), 75 to 80, 2021
- Are less hierarchical firms organized around stronger cultures? Evidence from big data, Strategic Management Journal 47(2), 463 to 493, 2026
In Organizational Structures
Known for
The microstructure of organizations
Ideas
Human-AI division of labor as a design problem. Puranam proposed typologies of how decisions can be divided between human and algorithm and of the learning configurations they can be arranged in, as building blocks for design. Caveat: A short conceptual essay.
What is new about new forms. With Alexy and Reitzig, Puranam decomposed organizing into four universal problems (task division, task allocation, reward provision, and information provision), proposed criteria for judging whether a form of organizing is new, and concluded that even when existing theory can explain much about the individual elements of forms such as Linux, Wikipedia, and Oticon, the opportunity for new theory lies in the bundles of co-occurring elements and in why the same bundles occur in widely disparate organizations. Caveat: Conceptual, with illustrative contrasts and no test.
Tacit coordination. With Srikanth, showed in 126 offshored processes that tacit coordination mechanisms are distinct from building communication channels and from modularizing work. Caveat: One setting, survey measures.
Compensatory fit. With Gulati, showed formally when an inconsistency between formal and informal organization can help rather than hurt. Caveat: Conditions are restrictive by the authors' own model.
Culture as a substitute for hierarchy. Across 23,000 United States firms, less managerial hierarchy went with stronger culture, consistent with the two being functional equivalents. Caveat: Correlational.