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This special issue introduces new cross-disciplinary, cross-level, and cross-cultural perspectives on job design. The authors examine job design from the viewpoints of organizational behavior, sociology, economics, corporate strategy, entrepreneurship, and evolutionary psychology. They consider job design in the context of interpersonal interactions, teams, leadership, networks, occupations, organizational structures, national cultures, and institutional fields. They explore how employees take initiative to craft their jobs, negotiate idiosyncratic deals, and navigate entrepreneurial roles, corporate director roles, executive roles, and careers.

We show that skill requirements in job vacancy postings differentially increased in MSAs that were hit hard by the Great Recession, relative to less hard-hit areas. These increases persist through at least the end of 2015 and are correlated with increases in capital investments, both at the MSA and firm levels. We also find that effects are most pronounced in routine-cognitive occupations, which exhibit relative wage growth as well. We argue that this evidence is consistent with the restructuring of production toward routine- biased technologies and the more-skilled workers that complement them, and that the Great Recession accelerated this process.

On the leading job board CareerBuilder.com, high-wage job postings unexpectedly attract fewer applicants, and this is the case even within a detailed occupation. Viewed through the lens of our directed search model, this negative relationship is indicative of substantial applicant heterogeneity within an occupation. Empirically, we find that job title heterogeneity is key: within a job title, jobs with 10% higher wages do attract 7.7% more applicants. Furthermore, our findings are consistent with a higher return to worker quality for hires in “manager” and “senior” job titles. Overall, our findings demonstrate the power of words in the matching process.

We offer a unified analysis of the growth of low-skill service occupations between 1980 and 2005 and the concurrent polarization of US employment and wages. We hypothesize that polarization stems from the interaction between consumer preferences, which favor variety over specialization, and the falling cost of automating routine, codifiable job tasks. Applying a spatial equilibrium model, we corroborate four implications of this hypothesis. Local labor markets that specialized in routine tasL · differentially adopted information technology, reallocated low-skill labor into service occupations (employment polarization), experienced earnings growth at the tails of the distribution (wage polarization), and received inflows of skilled labor.

In this essay, I begin by identifying the reasons that automation has not wiped out a majority of jobs over the decades and centuries. Automation does indeed substitute for labor—as it is typically intended to do. However, automation also complements labor, raises output in ways that leads to higher demand for labor, and interacts with adjustments in labor supply. Journalists and even expert commentators tend to overstate the extent of machine substitution for human labor and ignore the strong complementarities between automation and labor that increase productivity, raise earnings, and augment demand for labor. Changes in technology do alter the types of jobs available and what those jobs pay. In the last few decades, one noticeable change has been a “polarization” of the labor market, in which wage gains went disproportionately to those at the top and at the bottom of the income and skill distribution, not to those in the middle; however, I also argue, this polarization and is unlikely to continue very far into future. The final section of this paper reflects on how recent and future advances in artificial intelligence and robotics should shape our thinking about the likely trajectory of occupational change and employment growth. I argue that the interplay between machine and human comparative advantage allows computers to substitute for workers in performing routine, codifiable tasks while amplifying the comparative advantage of workers in supplying problem-solving skills, adaptability, and creativity.

Does adoption of broadband internet in firms enhance labor productivity and increase wages? Is this technological change skill biased or factor neutral? We combine several Norwegian data sets to answer these questions. A public program with limited funding rolled out broadband access points and provides plausibly exogenous variation in the availability and adoption of broadband internet in firms. Our results suggest that broadband internet improves (worsens) the labor market outcomes and productivity of skilled (unskilled) workers. We explore several possible explanations for the skill complementarity of broadband internet. We find suggestive evidence that broadband adoption in firms complements skilled workers in executing nonroutine abstract tasks, and substitutes for unskilled workers in performing routine tasks. Taken together, our findings have important implications for the ongoing policy debate over government investment in broadband infrastructure to encourage productivity and wage growth.

Despite telecommuting’s growing popularity, its implication for telecommuter job performance is a matter of on-going public debate. Moreover, empirical evidence that could address this issue is scarce and conflicting. This study therefore not only examines whether telecommuting impacts job performance, but also investigates characteristics of the telecommuter’s work that might help or hinder their ability to perform their job. Integrating work design research with theorizing about telecommuting, our theoretical framework proposes that two knowledge characteristics, namely job complexity and problem solving, and two social characteristics, specifically interdependence and social support, moderate the extent of telecommuting–job performance relationship. We test our framework using matched data from telecommuters and their supervisors (N = 273) in an organization with a voluntary telecommuting program. Findings indicate that for telecommuters who held complex jobs, for those in jobs involving low levels of interdependence and for those in jobs with low levels of social support, the extent of telecommuting had a positive association with job performance. Across all moderators considered, the extent of telecommuting’s association with job performance ranged from benign to positive; findings did not support negative associations between the extent of telecommuting and job performance regardless of the level of each moderator examined. These results suggest the need to investigate the extent of telecommuting as well as the nature of the telecommuter’s job when studying work outcomes such as job performance, and that more research is needed.

Using the text from job ads, we introduce a new dataset to describe the evolution of work from 1950 to 2000. We show that the transformation of the US labor market away from routine cognitive and manual tasks and toward nonroutine interactive and analytic tasks has been larger than prior research has found, with a substantial fraction of total changes occurring within narrowly defined job titles. We provide narrative and systematic evidence on changes in task content within job titles and on the emergence and disappearance of individual job titles.

We study variation in skill demands for professionals across firms and labor markets. We categorize a wide range of keywords found in job ads into 10 general skills. There is substantial variation in these skill requirements, even within narrowly defined occupations. Focusing particularly on cognitive and social skills, we find positive correlations between each skill and external measures of pay and firm performance. We also find evidence of a cognitive social skill complementarity for both outcomes. As a whole, job skills have explanatory power in pay and firm performance regressions beyond what is available in widely used labor market data.

This paper explores the attention regulation challenges brought by interruptions. In contrast to much of the research on interruptions that looks at the effects on the interrupted task, this paper examines the difficulty of focusing attention and performing well on interrupting tasks. Integrating research on attention residue, time pressure, and implementation intention, we predict that when people anticipate resuming their interrupted work under time pressure, they will find it difficult to switch their attention to the interrupting task, leading to attention residue and low performance. A ready-to-resume intervention, in which one briefly reflects on and plans one’s return to the interrupted task, mitigates this effect such that attention residue is reduced and performance on the interrupting task does not suffer. Data collected across four studies support these hypotheses. The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1184 .