I am looking for references to some well-respected publications which deal with defining complexity, categorizing complexity, possibly creating taxonomies of complex jobs, differentiating simple vs. complex jobs or skills. MY research is about acquisition of complex job skills. I need to defend how workplace complexity is generally defined or viewed in recognized publications. I also want to validate if the job types I gathered indeed are complex or not. Let me know if you know of any good publications dealing with complexity of skills, knowledge, job, workplace or complexity in general.
Understanding Complexity, available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266476979_Understanding_Complexity, offers a primer on complexity and complexity thinking. The table it reproduces on decisions in multiple contexts , adapted from David Snowden and Mary Boone. 2007. A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review. November, pp. 69–76., offers useful guidance.
Article Understanding Complexity
Interpreting is a complex task that combines several abilities beyond language competence in order to enable delivery of an effective professional interpretation in a given setting on performance levels.
www.govtilr.org/skills/interpretationSLDsapproved.htm
https://careersintheory.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/applied-chaos/
The previous link illustrates a few core concepts of the chaos theory of careers (CTC) developed by Pryor & Bright (2010). You could also take a look at the references cited within the text (e.g. Bloch, 2005 which are focused on complexity concepts at work and career) that were used by the authors to represent several approaches serving as CTC elements. That theory posits that career development and workplaces' dynamics occur amidst influences of chaos where change and stability are both into play and where a plethora of effects caused by the environment, by the person itself, by community, hypersystems, subsystems and happenstance create consecutive unforeseen events of critical importance for personal and career development.
Regarding the field of job skills I consider interesting the ongoing work of Akkermans and colleagues..see this page for example. https://scholar.google.gr/scholar?client=ms-android-lenovo&espv=1&um=1&ie=UTF-8&lr&q=related:dN3dOIpVg7uhCM:scholar.google.com/ Regarding career management skills authors such as Ronald Sultana have written extensively on this issue. Hope this was helpful for your research.
If complex skills/tasks complexity cannot be ascertain/categorized through a direct measure, the degree of responsibility expected of an employee may instead be a good proxy measure. In many organizational settings, complex jobs are partitioned and "farmed out" to different parties, such that a failure in one component of the job is never critical to the success/completion of the job. Since there are redundancies and duplicated tasks associated with it.
Knowing where "the buck ends" is also very telling in this regard. Considerations of team work is important in setting the level of task complexity. Where task complexity at the level of the individual can be further augmented if the job needs to be completed by a team.
Article Flexibility under complexity: Work contexts, task profiles a...
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