job design: The case of corporate directors

Although job design has long been a central topic in the academic literature on organizations, theoretical perspectives on job design are rooted primarily in organizational psychology, and have only recently begun to draw from sociological theory. Moreover, extant sociological perspectives have focused largely on cross-cultural differences in the perception of job characteristics and the effect of social structure on job design (e.g., Spreitzer, 1996; Perlow & Weeks, 2002; Gelfand, Erez, & Aycan, 2007). While this literature has yielded important insights by examining how features of the macro-social context could influence job design, it has given little consideration to how individual agency or sociopolitical factors could moderate these effects. In this essay, I suggest one possible approach to developing a sociopolitical perspective on job design. In particular, I suggest how job design may be the subject of impression management, and illustrate this idea in the context of a specific corporate role that has received little attention in the job design literature, namely the role of corporate director. Sociological perspectives on impression management suggest that organizational actors enhance or perpetuate their power and influence by presenting themselves (and the groups and organizations to which they belong) in ways that conform to prevailing ‘‘institutional logics,’’ or the normative expectations of powerful constituents for organizational behavior (Elsbach, 1994; Westphal & Zajac, 1994; Zott & Huy, 2007; Westphal & Graebner, 2009). Impression management may be strictly verbal or rhetorical, but it may also involve concrete actions (e.g., a change in policy, structure, or leadership) that give the appearance of conforming to constituent expectations and/or serving their interests. From a sociological perspective, this impression management—whether verbal claims or concrete actions— may be ‘‘decoupled’’ (or separated from) the reality of actual behavior in organizations (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Pfeffer, 1981; Westphal & Zajac, 1994; Westphal & Graebner, 2009).