Richard Hackman

Job Characteristics Model, team effectiveness

J. Richard Hackman (1940–2013) served as Edgar Pierce Professor of Social and Organisational Psychology at Harvard University. He co-developed the Job Characteristics Model with Greg Oldham, identifying five core job dimensions—skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback—that drive intrinsic motivation. His later work on team effectiveness argued that structure and context matter more than interpersonal dynamics in determining whether teams succeed.