Announcement

The Special Issue "The appeal and risks of maverick organization design practices "- Read More

There are maverick organizational design practices that generate a lot of hype and interest. By maverick practices, we mean organization structures, processes, and tools that deviate from the norm. Examples include a refusal to rely on the management hierarchy for the division of labor and the integration of effort, eliminating stable boundaries between groups, or removing traditional mechanisms of allocating work and rewards. Some labels we have seen in the last decade for this include Holacracy (Bernstein et al., 2016), the ‘Spotify model’ (Gerster, Brenner & Dremel, 2020), Haier’s rendanheyi model (Luo et al., 2018), Agile (Rigby, Sutherland & Takeuchi, 2016), and more recently, decentralized autonomous organizations or DAOs (Hsieh et al., 2018). These ideas are often developed by entrepreneurs or leadership teams that are looking to disrupt the status quo. They find some early successes in adopting these novel practices, and – unsurprisingly – other companies proceed to copy what looks like a new best practice. At times, these radically new ways of organizing enjoy only short-lived success, causing the originators to abandon these ideas in part or in whole. In other cases, the originating company sustains the practice for years, further evolving and refining it. Meanwhile, as the originators outgrow or further evolve their maverick practices, the imitators discover that they may have over-rotated, creating major downsides. These companies may end up adopting a much diluted version of the practice or giving up altogether. At times, the maverick vision is used by leaders to inspire change in their organizations even if the ultimate intention is to only adopt whatever part of the original idea is feasible and value-adding.

In this special issue, we want to further explore this dynamic, both from the perspective of the originator as from that of the imitator. For this exploration, we are aiming to collect contributions from both practitioners and academics. Our aim is to contribute to the knowledge at the disposal of practitioners, specifically when it comes to generating, appraising, and applying novel organization design practices.

Editors for Special Issue

Jeroen van Bree, Berenschot & University of Amsterdam

Martin Gonzalez, Google & Stanford University

Oliver Baumann, University of Southern Denmark

Brian Wu, University of Michigan

Submission Deadline:

Full Manuscripts: December 12th, 2023