Design operators to support organisational design

Organisational design is an important topic in the literature on organisations. Usually the design principles are addressed informally in this literature. This paper makes a first attempt to formally introduce design operators to formalize the design steps in the process of designing organisations. These operators help an organisation designer create an organisation design from scratch as well as offer the possibility to revise existing designs of organisations. The operators offer both top-down refinements and bottom-up grouping options. Importantly, the operators can be combined into complex operators that can serve as patterns for larger steps in an organisation design process. The usability of the design operators is demonstrated in a running example. This is demonstrated by an implemented prototype example tool.