Conceptual Ambiguity and the Routing of Tasks in Organizations (22 Oct 2026)

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 13:00:00 GMT

The Organizational Design Community (ODC) invites you to the following webinar:

Conceptual Ambiguity and the Routing of Tasks in Organizations

Balázs Kovács

Professor of Organizational Behavior

School of Management, Yale University

--- 22^nd October 2026, Thursday at 9am EST/3pm CET ---

Prof. Kovács will share with us insights from his joint research with coauthors Michael Hannan (Stanford) and Gäel Le Mens (U Pompeu Fabra) on the implications of conceptual ambiguity for organizational design.

Organizations divide labor by sorting incoming tasks into specialized units and then assigning them to specialized workers. Yet the conceptual structure that enables this division also creates problems when an incoming item does not map cleanly onto one destination. Professor Kovács, distinguishes two consequences of conceptual ambiguity in routing: administrative friction while the organization tries to place the item, and an expertise-coverage problem when no worker in the relevant pool has closely related prior experience. The authors test this argument using 1.39 million patent applications filed at the United States Patent and Trademark Office between 2004 and 2013. Text-based measures capture ambiguity in assignment to specialized units and to workers within them, while similarity to prior work measures relevant experience. Unit-level ambiguity predicts longer intake time and poorer fit with the receiving unit. Within units, worker-level ambiguity predicts weaker fit even to the specialist with the most closely related experience, and a lower likelihood of assignment to that specialist. Poor expertise coverage predicts slower subsequent processing. These results show how specialization creates gaps between established domains and why routing cannot fully solve the problems posed by work that falls into those gaps.

About the Speaker:

Balázs Kovács is Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management and, by courtesy, Professor of Sociology. He studies how categories, awards, reviews, and social networks shape how audiences search for information, evaluate quality, and judge what counts as novel. His work also examines how organizational design shapes the routing of tasks and access to expertise. He combines large-scale data analysis and AI-based methods with simulations, experiments, and formal modeling, studying domains ranging from music, literature, and dining to science and patenting. His current work examines how AI-assisted search changes the prior work researchers discover and the ideas they generate, including whether these tools broaden exploration or concentrate attention on the same sources. His research appears in journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review, Organization Science, Management Science, Research Policy, Strategic Management Journal. He currently serves as a Senior Editor at Organization Science. He received his PhD from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.

Registration closes on 21^st October 2026 at 9 am EST

The live webinar is open to the public. The recorded webinar is only available for ODC members.

Come join us!

Arianna Marchetti

Assistant Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship

Lee Kong Chian School of Business

Singapore Management University

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Conceptual Ambiguity and the Routing of Tasks in Organizations (22 Oct 2026)