 Walk in my shoes: Does perspective-taking enable better work design?Dizhen Lu and Liang Meng Journal of Business Research, 2025, vol. 199, issue C Abstract: Despite the vast amount of research on work design, few studies directly examined work design as a behavior and/or explored the antecedents of “poor” work design. Across three studies, we found fundamental divergence in work design behaviors between individuals adopting the manager’s and the employee’s perspectives. Study 1 supported this major finding by showing that managers were less likely to assign enriching tasks to their employees when adopting the manager’s perspective. Study 2 further revealed that perspective-taking would reduce the discrepancy in work design behaviors between individuals adopting different perspectives, and help managers to design enriching work for their employees. Study 3 replicated these findings in real work settings, demonstrating that perspective-taking significantly enhances managers’ consideration of skill variety in work design. Taken together, this study contributes to the literature on work design antecedents and perspective-taking, and promotes sound work design in managerial practice. Keywords: Work design; Job enrichment; Skill variety; Perspective-taking (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:199:y:2025:i:c:s014829632500339x DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2025.115516 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier |
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