Organisation design in operations management

The organisational design of production systems is thought to be one of the key determinants of their performance. Therefore, in order to enable them to contribute effectively to the successful creation of products and services, OM practitioners need up‐to‐date, comprehensive and sufficiently detailed organisation design theory. However, 27 case studies aimed at identifying and explaining design performance relationships produced results that could not be explained using organisation theory (OT), while operations management (OM) theory did not provide much help either. OM, because the discipline lacks good organisation design theory. OT, because of some severe limitations, which are mostly due to the paradigmatic directions this discipline has taken. Consequently, OM has to take up the gauntlet itself. An agenda for OM‐driven organisation research is proposed, which builds on the strengths of OT, takes away its major weaknesses, and is believed to contribute to the development of actionable organisation design theory.