White Collar Workforce Management: An Operations-Oriented Survey

Although white collar work is of vast importance to the economy, the Operations Management (OM) literature has focused largely on traditional blue collar work. In an effort to stimulate more OM research into the design, control and management of white collar work systems, this paper provides a systematic review of disparate streams of research relevant to understanding white collar work from an operations perspective. Our review classifies research according to its relevance to white collar work at individual, team and organizational levels. By examining the literature in the context of this framework, we identify gaps in our understanding of white collar work which suggest promising research directions.