Job and Team Design¶

Status: emerging
Last updated: 2026-05-31
Sources: 9781119636113.Ch15.Pdf
Tags: [job-design, team-design, work-design, job-characteristics, motivation, organizational-design]

Summary¶

Job design is the structuring of the set of tasks performed by a worker, and team design extends this to groups; both strongly influence efficiency and human-resource outcomes such as productivity, quality, satisfaction, and training time (Morgeson & Campion, 2021). The chapter adopts an interdisciplinary perspective, identifying four job-design approaches — mechanistic, motivational, perceptual/motor, and biological — each oriented toward a different subset of outcomes with its own trade-offs. It treats the job as a convenient unit of analysis and argues that considerable design discretion exists in most situations.

Body¶

Context¶

Morgeson and Campion (2021), in their handbook chapter on job and team design, examine the structuring of the set of tasks performed by a worker and its extension to groups. They take an interdisciplinary perspective, identifying four job-design approaches — mechanistic, motivational, perceptual/motor, and biological — each oriented toward a different subset of outcomes with its own trade-offs, and treat the job as a convenient unit of analysis with considerable design discretion in most situations. Within this knowledge base it sits in the work- and job-design cluster alongside Workplace Design and Task Analysis, and connects to Human Systems Integration and Mental Workload, where job structure shapes operator load.

Key Points¶

Job design is a commonplace yet often unnoticed aspect of managing organisations. People recognise its importance during start-ups or restructuring but less often realise it is affected by daily task assignment, changing markets or strategies, workforce changes, or performance, safety, and satisfaction problems. Drawing on Campion and Medsker (1992, cited in Morgeson & Campion, 2021), the chapter treats job design change as an intervention that can advance organisational goals; while organisational structure, technology, processes, and environment constrain it, considerable discretion remains (PDF p. 1, orig. p. 383).

The importance of job design lies in its consequences: it has predictable effects on a broad range of efficiency and human-resource outcomes, including productivity, quality, job satisfaction, and training times. This positions job design as a lever on both organisational performance and worker well-being rather than a purely administrative concern (PDF p. 1, orig. p. 383).

Morgeson and Campion adopt an interdisciplinary view of design approaches, each oriented toward a particular subset of outcomes with its own advantages, disadvantages, and trade-offs. The four — mechanistic, motivational, perceptual/motor, and biological — each carry a distinct set of design principles, so designers must balance them rather than apply one uniformly (PDF pp. 2–3, orig. pp. 384–385).

Team design and implementation guidance extend the framework. The chapter addresses team design alongside job design (PDF p. 2, orig. p. 384), incorporates social and contextual work characteristics beyond the four core approaches, and closes with implementation advice — general, job-design-specific, and team-design-specific — together with measurement considerations (PDF pp. 15–24, orig. pp. 397–406).

Conclusion¶

Morgeson and Campion (2021) conclude that job and team design is a consequential lever on both organisational performance and worker well-being, and that because the four approaches pull toward different outcomes, sound design means deliberately balancing their trade-offs. The chapter serves as both a theoretical taxonomy and a practical guide for restructuring work.

References¶

Morgeson, F.P. & Campion, M.A. (2021) 'Job and Team Design', in Salvendy, G. & Karwowski, W. (eds.) Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics. 5th edn. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. morgeson2021jobteamdesign

Open Questions¶

How should the trade-offs among mechanistic, motivational, perceptual/motor, and biological approaches be resolved for a given job?
How does increasing automation change which job-design approach yields the best outcomes?