Contextualizing job design for individual work performance: The role of organizational strategy and structure

This two-study, top-down multilevel research examines how to create high-performance jobs within well-designed organizations. By integrating a broad strategic human resource management perspective with the traditional strategy–structure–performance framework and influential job demands–resources theory, we explored whether and how the alignment of cognitive job demands and task-related resources mediates the cross-level relationship between strategy–structure fit and employees' task performance. Multilevel mediation analyses were performed using nested, time-lagged data (Study 1: 874 employees across 49 organizations; Study 2: 479 employees and 171 managers across 40 organizations). Results consistently show that strategy–structure fit, as a macrolevel context, is too distal to directly influence individual work performance. Instead, the alignment of strategic ambidexterity and cross-functional integration enhances microlevel job demands–resources fit, which then improves employees’ task performance. These replicated findings, further supported by latent profile analysis, highlight the importance of contextualizing job design within organizational systems and introduce a multilevel, multi-fit framework with practical insights for human resource and organizational design professionals. • Integrates and advances organizational design and job design literatures. • Strategy-structure fit is too distal to influence employees' task performance directly. • The relationship is mediated by job demands-resources fit. • Active jobs within analyzers without innovation outperform all other organization-job profiles.