It’s Not Just a Job: Understanding the Process and Consequences of External Stakeholder Collaboration in Designing Jobs

About the seminar topic

Designing jobs is crucial for the development of all organisations, but it is a process that invokes many challenges, liabilities of newness and other risks. One way to overcome such challenges and reduce risks is to collaborate with external stakeholders, actors with interests in organisations’ outcomes but without formal internal organisational role, who can bring expertise and resources into the process. In this paper, we ask how such collaborations unfold and with what organisational consequences. We use a startup accelerator as a strategic research setting, examining how one type of internal actor, entrepreneurs, engage in job-design collaborations with one set of external stakeholders, accelerator partners.

Drawing on interview and observational data, we develop a two-step model of job-design collaboration. First, triggered by discussions of ongoing problems, internal actors and external stakeholders recognise that their particular problem could be solved by designing a new job. Second, they work together to allocate work to those jobs through co-creation and brokering to living templates and experts. These collaborative processes enable managers not only to design jobs but also to hire, learn and develop relationships. This study contributes to our understanding of where new job designs come from by unpacking this novel job-design process. 

Speaker bio

Lisa Cohen is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Desautels Faculty Scholar at the Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University. Prior to joining Desautels, she had been a faculty member at London Business School, the Yale School of Management and the Graduate School of Management, University of California, Irvine, where she taught in the areas of strategic human resources, organisational behaviour and communications.

Following postgraduate studies at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University and the Walter A. Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, Lisa Cohen enjoyed a successful consultancy career. She worked as Principal Consultant at Terranova Consulting Group/Right Management Consultants, a human resource and management consulting firm working to improve organisations’ potential through their people.

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No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.