Ramasubu and Bardhan’s work does not directly discuss providing workers with control of their physical environments, but the team’s findings can be extended to doing so. The researchers report that they “assess the causal impacts of adopting an organizational policy that grants higher levels of autonomy to project teams. . . . we posit that an organizational policy that provides higher levels of autonomy for software teams engenders performance-enhancing adaptations through agile reconfigurations of project operations. To test our hypothesis, we collaborated with a commercial firm and collected data from a policy experiment at the firm. We examined project-level data spanning a four-year observation period during which the firm implemented a new policy that significantly reduced the hurdles for project teams to autonomously reconfigure their operations. The results support our postulation . . . an organizational policy that provides greater autonomy to software teams for designing their context-specific project configurations can improve project performance.”
Narayan Ramasubu and Indranil Bardhan. “Reconfiguring for Agility: Examining the Performance Implications for Project Team Autonomy Through an Organizational Policy Experiment.” MIS Quarterly, in press, https://misq.umn.edu/reconfiguring-for-agility-examining-the-performance…
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.