A large part of many people's workday consists of interactions with others. Yet job design research has tended to neglect these network interactions as sources of attitudes and behaviors. Looking back at the history of job design research, we can trace how interest in social aspects of job design have waned and waxed. In 1971, Hackman & Lawler published a precursor to the Hackman and Oldham (1975, 1976) Job Characteristics model. In addition to the core job dimensions of variety, autonomy, task identity, and feedback, Hackman and Lawler included two social dimensions: dealing with others and friendship opportunities. Prior to 1971, researchers from the Tavistock Institute endorsed aligning the social and the technical. Despite considerable research on ''socio-technical systems'' (Cooper & Foster, 1971;Herbst, 1962;Trist, Higgin, Murray, & Pollack, 1963), the social dimension of job design was excluded from what became the dominant job design model. Following Herzberg's (1966) emphasis on the motivational nature of the job itself, and debate concerning intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (e.g., Deci, 1971), Hackman and Oldham chose to focus exclusively on the individual in relation to his or her task. They dropped ''dealing with others'' and ''friendship opportunities'' and modified task feedback to only include feedback from doing the job itself (in additional to adding task significance and modifying variety to focus on a variety of skills).
The Hackman/Oldham model generated a tremendous burst of research, but the social aspects of job design did not reappear until Salancik and Pfeffer's (1978) social information processing critique. The SIP framework generated considerable research as scholars argued over whether job characteristics were objective or socially constructed. The flurry of research died quickly because the effects of social cues in the experimental situations typical of SIP research tended to be fleeting (as shown by Kilduff & Regan, 1988). In many ways, Hackman and Oldham seemed to have closed the book on job design.
However, there is now a resurgence of interest in the social aspects of job design. Specifically, relational job design approaches recognize that tasks seldom occur in isolation (see Grant & Parker, forthcoming, for a review). There are many important contributions of this relational turn including the development of measures of social characteristics of jobs (Morgeson & Humphrey, 2006) and analyses showing that these social characteristics explain significant amounts of variance in turnover intentions, organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and subjective performance (Humphrey, Nahrgang, & Morgeson, 2007). Further, theory and research has extended our understanding of how providing employees contact with those who benefit from their work strengthens employees' prosocial