Organization Design: Current Insights and Future Research Directions

We review the research on organization design from 2000 to 2023, inclusive. We identify four major approaches to organization design in the contemporary literature: configuration, control, channelization, and coordination. We discuss the key streams of research that characterize each of these approaches, as well as three emerging areas of research: AI and organizational decision-making, flat organizations, and multiple goals. Beyond the specific contributions of individual papers and streams of work, our review makes a number of high-level observations across approaches. We identify patterns that characterize this body of work, the methods used, open questions for future research, and a discussion of organization design as a theory. Collectively, these observations define the state of organization design research and may provide scholars with a foundation for future research.