Organizations increasingly coordinate work through relationships among employees, managers, teams, digital systems, and artificial intelligence, yet influential human-resource frameworks still often begin from the premise that people and their capabilities are resources possessed, configured, and deployed by firms. This original conceptual framework article argues that this vocabulary is increasingly incomplete for technology-mediated work because it under-specifies relational interdependence, distributed agency, contribution attribution, and digitally mediated control. The article develops the proposed Relational Work-System Framework, which connects four domains: relational infrastructure, hybrid human–technology agency, recognition and contribution, and control and governance. The framework treats these domains as mutually conditioning rather than independent design variables and explicitly distinguishes technological capability from legitimate authority, contribution visibility from performance, voice opportunity from consequential influence, and autonomy from responsibility transfer. Six proposed propositions translate the synthesis into testable questions concerning relational-system fit, agency–authority congruence, contribution traceability, contestable control, complementarity–learning tensions, and cross-level evaluation. The framework is intended to organize theory development and organizational inquiry, not to certify a universally superior work architecture. Its central limitations are the heterogeneous evidentiary bases underlying the four domains, incomplete evidence on temporal and cross-level mechanisms, and contextual dependence on task, occupation, technology, power, and institutional arrangements. Future research should test the proposed relationships with multilevel, longitudinal, qualitative-process, and field-experimental designs before treating them as validated organizational guidance.
