The Hypothesis of Organization Design as Meaning—The Organization Design Gestalt

Rodrigo Magalhães ()
Additional contact information
Rodrigo Magalhães: Kuwait College of Science and Technology

Chapter Chapter 8 in Designing Organizations for the Betterment of Society, 2024, pp 117-134 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract At the highest level of abstraction, organization design-as-meaning takes the form of a cultural construction. It is the site where the quality of interactions, as well as the effectiveness of the formal and informal organizational structures are achieved. A gestalt is perceptual by definition, but when applied to the social-material realm of organization design, the design gestalt acquires a cultural, meaning-making capacity, which is a reflection of and is reflected in all manifestations of the organization’s design. The organization design gestalt is formed by cognitive and symbolic meanings, as well as non-cognitive sensations, such as emotion and affect. The concept of organizational experience is also central to our concept of the organization design gestalt. When stakeholders interact directly with artefacts or indirectly by means of interactions with other stakeholders, who are in one or another affected by organizational artefacts, they experience the organization. For example, when a customer talks to after-sales services, she has indirect interaction with an organizational artefact in the form of the computer application(s) and the host of company procedures that the after-sales employee needs to utilize in order to provide the service. Thus, the experience of the after-sales service is a consequence of the host of ethic-aesthetic judgements made by the customer in that particular interaction with the company. Hence, through the values and principles it encapsulates, and the behaviours it promotes, the organization design gestalt shapes organizational experiences.

Keywords: Aesthetics; Ethics; Cultural construction; Cognitive meanings; Symbolic meanings; Non-cognitive sensations; Emotion; Affect; Organization design gestalt; Organizational experience (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-64483-2_8

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783031644832

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-64483-2_8

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().