Journal of Organization Design - Forthcoming special issue: "Maverick Organization Design in Practice: An Examination of Its Appeal, Risk, and Effective Implementation”

Guest Editors Jeroen van Bree (Berenschot and University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) and Martin Gonzalez (Google and Stanford University, USA), along with the Editors-in-Chief of the Journal of Organization Design, are currently evaluating submissions for potential publication in a special issue on the topic of "Maverick Organization Design in Practice: An Examination of Its Appeal, Risk, and Effective Implementation.” 

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Maverick organization design practices generate a lot of hype and interest, as we’ve seen in recent years. By maverick practice, 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 (Baumann & Wu, 2022). 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 and 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.

Some of the questions we are interested in answering in this special issue might include, but are not limited to, the following which may be divided into categories:

Origination of maverick organization design practices 

• What are the antecedents of maverick organization design practices? 
• What types of companies, leaders, or contextual inflection points originate such ideas? 
• What role does imprinting play–the lasting impression of the founders or early leaders on structures and processes (Alexy et al., 2021) in the creation/ongoing use of maverick organization design practices?
• What are some of the conditions that make a company sustain the maverick organizational design practices throughout their development and growth?

Imitation and adoption of maverick organization design practices

• What are some successful/unsuccessful examples of companies that have imitated and adopted maverick organization design practices?
• What are the conditions for an adopted organization design practice to scale successfully through different stages of growth?
• How does the “industry of management ideas” (Ghemawat, 2016; Mol, Birkinshaw & Foss, 2019; Madsen, 2020) work in relation to organization design ideas?
• How can OD practitioners guide decision-makers to avoid the blind adoption of “best practice”?
• What do decision-makers/CEOs gain by adopting these maverick practices that go beyond their apparent functionality? For instance, is there still strong evidence of mimetic isomorphism (Dimaggio & Powell, 1983) today, or other reputational benefits that motivate these decisions? (Examples outside of organization design include founder of defunct crypto exchange FTX Sam Bankman-Fried's patronage of effective altruism, and Gravity Payments' Dan Price's adoption of a "living wage policy.")

Good innovation in organization design

• What does ‘good innovation’ in organization design look like?
• How can organization design practitioners effectively guide leaders who want bold change in their organization model?
• How can organization design practitioners help firms graduate from one organization design paradigm to another?
• What are the limits to doing this with evidence rather than imitation?

About the Guest Editors

Jeroen van Bree is a consultant, lecturer, and author on organization design. His primary interest lies in using insights from organization and management theory to better equip executives and managers in their task of organization design: aligning and fitting together the roles, processes, and structures of an organization. He is a lecturer in the Executive Program in Management Studies at the University of Amsterdam.

First and foremost a practitioner, Jeroen has some 25 years of consulting experience and is currently a managing consultant at Berenschot, an independent management consulting firm based in The Netherlands. In this capacity, he works with leadership teams in a variety of  industries, to support them in the process and content of designing their organization. He is the former chair of the European Organisation Design Forum, the professional association of organization designers in Europe, and sits on the board of directors of the Organizational Design Community. 

Jeroen holds a PhD from Nyenrode Business Universiteit, The Netherlands. His latest thinking can be found in his book Organization Design: Frameworks, Principles, and Approaches (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Jeroen lives in the beautiful historic city center of Utrecht, The Netherlands, with his wife and daughter. 

Martin Gonzalez is the Global Organization Development Lead for Google’s Compute Business (think Chrome, Android, Pixel, Nest, Fitbit, Photos, AI/Machine Learning/Quantum Computing research groups). He works with Google’s senior leaders to shape their team’s culture, grow their people and build cool things that matter. 

Martin is part of the faculty of the Google School for Leaders and a frequent lecturer at MBA and Engineering programs at Stanford, Wharton, INSEAD, London Business School, Tsinghua University and Singapore Management University. He is also the creator of Google for Startup’s PeopleLab, an effort to take what Google has learned about developing people and culture to startups around the world. He has run leadership courses and mentored thousands of tech startup founders, from seed stage to unicorn, across more than 70 countries in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. 

Before Google, Martin was a strategy and organizational consultant at Boston Consulting Group. He holds two master’s degrees in organizational psychology and behavioral science from Columbia University and the London School of Economics. He’s lived and worked in New York, Jakarta, Singapore, Taipei and Manila where he is originally from. Today, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three kids. 

Submission Guidelines for Manuscripts and Revisions

We have a broad definition of what organization design is, but there should be some design aspect in each paper (or at least a discussion of the design implications). That said, the Journal of Organization Design is very inclusive with regard to perspectives, research traditions, etc. – papers should be fresh, provocative, and high-quality. The journal is also flexible in that we accept submissions in a number of article categories; not all papers need to be classical research articles. For instance, we are open to review and accept “point of view” papers, “translationals” (academic research written toward practitioners), “research primers” (introductions to a specific discussion), and more. All article types may be submitted for consideration. Please see https://www.springer.com/journal/41469 (this opens in a new tab) for guidelines. 

Manuscripts and their revisions should be submitted via http://www.editorialmanager.com/jorg (this opens in a new tab). When asked whether you are submitting to a special issue, please choose “Yes” from the drop-down menu and choose the appropriate title. All papers submitted must represent original research not previously published elsewhere. All submissions will be subject to in-depth review.

Further Information

Questions pertaining to this special issue may be directed to:

Jeroen van Bree (j.vanbree@berenschot.nl)
Martin Gonzalez (martingonzalez@google.com)

References

Alexy, O., Poetz, K., Puranam, P., & Reitzig, M. (2021). Adaptation or persistence? Emergence and revision of organization designs in new ventures. Organization Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.1431 (this opens in a new tab).

Baumann, O. & Wu, B. (2022). The many dimensions of research on designing flat firms. Journal of Organization Design, 11(1), 1–3.

Bernstein, E., Bunch, J., Canner, N., & Lee, M. (2016). Beyond the Holacracy hype: the overwrought claims—and actual promise—of the next generation of self-managed teams. Harvard Business Review, 94(7/8), 38–49.

Dimaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48(2), 147–160.

Ghemawat, P. (2016). Evolving ideas about business strategy. Business History Review, 90(4), 727–749.

Gerster, D., Brenner, W., & Dremel, C. (2020). How enterprises adopt agile forms of organizational design: A multiple-case study. The Data Base for Advances in Information Systems, 51(1), 84–103.

Hsieh, Y.-Y., Vergne, J.-P., Anderson, P., Lakhani, K., & Reitzig, M. (2018). Bitcoin and the rise of decentralized autonomous organizations. Journal of Organization Design (Aarhus), 7(1).

Luo, J., Van de Ven, A. H., Jing, R., & Jiang, Y. (2018). Transitioning from a hierarchical product organization to an open platform organization: A Chinese case study. Journal of Organization Design, 7(1), 1–14.

Madsen, D. Ø. (2020). The evolutionary trajectory of the agile concept viewed from a management fashion perspective. Social Sciences, 9(5), 69.

Mol, M., Birkinshaw, J., & Foss, N. J. (2019). The system of management ideas: Origins, micro-foundations, and dynamics. In A. Sturdy, S. Heusinkveld, T. Reay, & D. Strang (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Management Ideas (pp. 25–41). Oxford University Press.

Rigby, D. K., Sutherland, J., & Takeuchi, H. (2016). Embracing agile: How to master the process that’s transforming management. Harvard Business Review, 94(5), 40–50.