Co-Constructed Work Design in Production: Toward Realizing Human-Centric Operations

Doctoral thesis, 2026

The manufacturing industry is undergoing a transformation toward Industry 5.0, a paradigm emphasizing human-centricity alongside resilience and sustainability. While Industry 4.0 promised efficiency, anticipated gains were often limited by neglected human aspects. This thesis argues that to realize human-centric operations, research must move beyond static approaches to work design and examine the interplay between top-down structural conditions and bottom-up employee agency.

This thesis explores the dynamics of work design across the individual (micro), team (meso), and organizational (macro) levels in the manufacturing industry. Employing dialectical pluralism, the multi-methodological approach integrates exploratory qualitative interviews, a quantitative cross-sectional survey, and a longitudinal design science research study evaluating an intervention in multiskilled production teams within the Swedish manufacturing sector.

The findings reveal that work design in production is a co-construction process where bottom-up agency is contingent upon top-down structural conditions. At the micro level, misalignment between prescribed and perceived work characteristics drives front-line managers to redesign their work through compensatory job crafting. While handling immediate disturbances, this reactive crafting masks systematic design problems from senior management. At the meso level, an organizational learning structure demonstrates that deliberate top-down scaffolding facilitates constructive agency. By operationalizing dual team membership within multiskilled production teams, the organization effectively bridges the individual and organizational levels through team-based integration.

Furthermore, the results challenge the assumed universality of motivational models in highly standardized contexts. In this setting, work characteristics show strong associations with employee well-being, often bypassing expected motivational pathways. Moreover, the transition to human-centric work design introduces novel systemic challenges. The research identifies a paradox of success where successful upskilling initiatives increase internal mobility, inadvertently destabilizing the very teams they were designed to strengthen.

In conclusion, this thesis conceptualizes work design not as a static assignment but as a dynamic co-construction process. To place human needs at the center of the production process, organizations must foster responsible autonomy, ensuring that the interplay between standardized systems and the need for human-centric work design feeds into organizational learning processes rather than reactive coping.