Job Design Flashcards

HRM: Job Design

Job Design/Redesign

  • Job Design: The process of defining how work will be performed and what tasks will be required in a given job.
  • Job Redesign: A similar process that involves changing an existing job design.
  • Effective job design requires understanding the job itself (through job analysis) and its place in the larger work unit's flow process (through work flow analysis).
  • Managers need detailed knowledge of tasks to design jobs effectively.

Job Design - Manager's Control

  • In theory, managers have complete control over job design, determining how a job is performed.
  • Many elements influence job design, with a key factor being the manager’s desired outcome to optimize.
  • Scarcity prevents optimizing all outcomes simultaneously, necessitating trade-offs and managerial decisions.

Four Approaches to Job Design (Campion & Thayer, 1985)

  • Efficiency (Productivity)
  • Worker Satisfaction (Social Needs)
  • Reliability
  • Lower Physical Strain
  • Each approach is geared toward different outcomes with associated costs and benefits.
  • Trade-offs are required as no single approach is universally optimal.

Fundamental Job Design Trade-off

  • The primary trade-off is between efficiency/productivity and worker satisfaction/social needs.
  • Conditions that improve efficiency (e.g., simple, repetitive jobs) often decrease satisfaction (leading to boredom).
  • Higher satisfaction correlates with lower turnover, increased effort, reduced supervision needs, and lower absenteeism, potentially leading to higher productivity and morale.
  • Campion’s four approaches explicitly considered reliability and lower physical strain as desirable outcomes.

Approaches to Job Design

  • Design for Efficiency (Industrial Engineering):
    • Clear displays and instructions
    • Memory aids
  • Design for Mental Capacity: Filtering information
  • Design for Motivation:
    • Job enlargement
    • Job enrichment
    • Teamwork
    • Flexibility
  • Design for Safety and Health (Ergonomics)

Core Disciplines

  • Mechanistic (Efficiency): Industrial Engineering (Taylor, 1911)
  • Motivational (Job Satisfaction): Organizational Psychology/Organizational Behavior (Hackman & Oldham, 1980)
  • Perceptual (Reliability): Human Factors (Salvendy, 1987)
  • Biological (Less Physical Strain/Injury): Physiology/Ergonomics (Astrand & Rodahl, 1977)

Four Types of Job Design - Benefits and Costs

  • Motivational:
    • Benefits: Increased satisfaction, motivation, involvement, performance; decreased absenteeism.
    • Costs: Increased training, staffing difficulty, errors, mental fatigue, stress, mental abilities, compensation.
  • Mechanistic:
    • Benefits: Decreased training, staffing difficulty, errors, mental fatigue, mental abilities, compensation.
    • Costs: Increased absenteeism; decreased satisfaction and motivation.
  • Biological:
    • Benefits: Decreased physical abilities, physical fatigue, aches, pains, medical incidents.
    • Costs: Increased financial costs and inactivity.
  • Perceptual/Motor:
    • Benefits: Decreased errors, accidents, mental fatigue, stress, training, staffing difficulty, mental abilities, compensation.
    • Costs: Increased boredom; decreased satisfaction.

Mechanistic Approach to Job Design

  • Focus is on efficiency/productivity.
  • Jobs are simple, easy to learn, and repetitive, fostering expertise in narrowly defined tasks.
  • Stems from the concept of “division of labor,” breaking jobs into small, discrete parts.

Scientific Management

  • Emphasis on greater workforce productivity [efficiency].
  • Addresses shortage of skilled labor by prioritizing efficient operations.
  • Concentrates on increasing workforce productivity by separating management functions from daily work.
  • Achieves efficiency through division of labor, new work rules and methods, standardized tools, and cooperation between workers and managers.
  • Efficiency & Standardization!
  • Frederick Taylor (1856-1915)

Frederick W. Taylor - The Principles of Scientific Management (1911)

  • The most influential book on management ever published.
  • The fundamental principle of Taylor's philosophy - the rule of knowledge as opposed to tradition and personal opinion - is as valid today as it was in his time.

Mechanistic Approach - Motivation

  • Workers are motivated by external/extrinsic tangible rewards (e.g., money).
  • Increased productivity raises workers’ value and output.
  • Greater output should translate into greater pay.

Designing for Efficiency - Scientific Management

  • Scientific Management: (Frederick W. Taylor, 1911): Jobs can be made highly efficient and productive by reducing complexity and designing for specialization (division of labor) and repetition (e.g., assembly lines). Doing the same thing over and over leads to the development of expertise. Plenty of research supports this conclusion.
  • However, simple, repetitive jobs are dehumanizing and boring, which leads to demotivated, apathetic workers. The key motivator is assumed to be money –more productivity leads to more output which leads to more pay.

Reaction to Scientific Management

  • Samuel Gompers (1850-1924), 1911 President AFL (American Federation of Labor) 1886-1924
  • Criticized Taylor's system for treating workers as cogs in a machine, requiring minimal thought or skill.

Efficiency versus Satisfaction

  • Traditionally, the main tradeoff in job design has been between designing jobs that lead to maximum efficiency/productivity and designing jobs that maximize worker satisfaction/motivation.

Motivational Approach to Job Design

  • Recognizes work as a social process, not just mechanical.
  • Integrates social sciences (e.g., psychology, sociology) into organizational study and job design.
  • Premise: Psychologically rewarding jobs (e.g., increased job satisfaction) lead to greater worker effort.
  • Jobs are enriched (made more complex) to engage workers.

Performance, Ability, Motivation Equation

  • Performance can be viewed in the following manner: P=f(A×M)\text{P} = f(\text{A} \times \text{M})
    • Where:
      • P=performance\text{P} = \text{performance}
      • A=ability\text{A} = \text{ability}
      • M=motivation\text{M} = \text{motivation}
  • Performance is some function of ABILITY times MOTIVATION.
  • Without motivation (the putting forth of effort) there is no performance.
  • Managers address ABILITY through, for example, the selection process and training. MOTIVATION is addressed through the management function of “leading.”

Designing for Motivation

  • In opposition to the dictates of scientific management is a school of thought that contends that work can be designed so that it is, in itself, interesting, and intrinsically (psychologically) motivating (e.g., Abraham Maslow).
  • Intrinsically motivating work can, in theory, lead to greater productivity because it leads to greater commitment, greater effort, less absenteeism, and less dysfunctional turnover.
  • Intrinsically motivating jobs are more complex (job enlargement and job enrichment).

Motivational Approach - Rewards

  • Fundamental to the Motivational Approach is the idea that workers are motivated by internal/intrinsic intangible rewards (e.g., job satisfaction, meaningfulness, psychological fulfillment and enrichment).

Preferences of Job Seekers

  • Appreciation for your work
  • Good relationship with colleagues
  • Good work-life balance
  • Good relationships with superior
  • Attractive fixed salary

Job Characteristics Model of Job Design

  • Core Job Dimensions:
    • Skill variety
    • Task identity
    • Task significance
    • Autonomy
    • Feedback
  • Critical Psychological States:
    • Experienced meaningfulness
    • Experienced responsibility
    • Knowledge of actual results
  • Personal & Work Outcomes:
    • High internal work motivation
    • High-quality work performance
    • High satisfaction with the work
    • Low absenteeism & turnover
  • Strength of Employees' Need for Growth
    • Recognition of individual differences among employees

Job Enrichment - Hackman and Oldham

  • A well-known model that incorporates job enrichment into the design of jobs is the Job Characteristics Model of J. Richard Hackman and Greg R. Oldham. Core Job Dimensions (i.e., skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, feedback) lead to Critical Psychological States (i.e., meaningfulness, responsibility, knowledge) which, in turn, lead to desired Personal and Work Outcomes (i.e., motivation, performance, satisfaction, lowered absenteeism, lowered turnover). In this model managers influence the motivational aspects of job content through careful and conscious job design decisions.

Characteristics of a Motivating Job

  • Skill Variety: Few skills needed vs. Many skills needed
  • Task Identity: Work is a small part of the whole vs. Whole piece of work is completed
  • Task Significance: Minor impact on others vs. Major impact on others
  • Autonomy: Decisions made by others vs. Much freedom to make decisions
  • Feedback: Difficult to see effectiveness vs. Effectiveness readily apparent

Job Design

  • Job Enlargement:
    • Broadening types of tasks performed in a job
  • Job Extension:
    • Enlarging jobs by combining several relatively simple jobs to form a job with a wider range of tasks
  • Job Rotation:
    • Enlarging jobs by moving employees among several different jobs

Job Enrichment

  • Empowering workers by adding more decision-making authority to jobs.
  • Based on Herzberg’s theory of motivation.
  • Individuals motivated more by intrinsic aspects of work.

Self-Managing Work Teams

  • Have authority for an entire work process or segment
  • Team members motivated by autonomy, skill variety, and task identity.

Designing for Efficiency vs. Motivation

  • Jobs designed for efficiency (simple, repetitive) and those designed for worker satisfaction/motivation (complex) are very different from each other.
  • Also, since jobs designed for efficiency are simple and repetitive they require fewer skills, and, given the supply and demand realities of labor markets, require less pay and lower training costs.
  • Proponents of jobs designed to be motivating (more complex, hence requiring higher pay and more training) contend that the greater motivation they create leads to greater productivity (the evidence is somewhat mixed on this point).

Productivity vs Satisfaction

  • One or the other, but not both.

Tradeoffs

  • Traditionally, the main tradeoff in job design was seen as “if we make a job more efficient, we then make it less satisfying (more boring) and less motivating; if we make it more motivating and more satisfying, then we make it less efficient.”
  • Because of this tradeoff jobs could be designed to emphasize and achieve one or the other but not both. Managers had to decide which outcome to focus on.

Two Additional Approaches

  • Reliability (design for mental capacity)
  • Ergonomics (design for safety and health)

Perceptual Approach to Job Design

  • The perceptual approach flows out of the field of human factors and human/machine interaction. The goal is to reduce cognitive load so as to reduce mental errors, thus increasing the reliability of a system. In some jobs failure is catastrophic and needs to be avoided (e.g., piloting an airliner, monitoring a nuclear power generating plant).

Designing for Reliability

  • Reliability (design for mental capacity): there are some jobs where any error could be catastrophic. 100% success is the goal(i.e., no failures). We don’t want the airplane we are travelling in to crash, or the nuclear power plant next door to melt down. Catastrophic errors often happen when workers are mentally overloaded and are overwhelmed with data/information. At the time most of that information is irrelevant, but it gets in the way of attending to the one critical piece of information that is needed to make a good, safe decision.
  • By lessening the mental strain/demands of a job, jobs designed for reliability often in practice may look like jobs designed for efficiency (i.e., simplified).

Designing Jobs That Meet Mental Capabilities and Limitations

  • Work is designed to reduce information-processing requirements of the job.
  • Workers may be less likely to make mistakes or have accidents.
  • Simpler jobs may be less motivating.
  • Technology tools may be distracting employees from their primary task resulting in increased mistakes and accidents.

Limit information and memorization requirements

  • Organizations can provide:
    • adequate lighting
    • easy-to-read gauges and displays
    • simple-to-operate equipment
    • clear instructions

Human Error Examples

  • Three Mile Island March 28, 1979
  • Chernobyl April 26, 1986

Reduce Cognitive Load/Reduce Human Error

  • British European Airways Cockpit

Biological Approach to Job Design

  • The biological approach flows out of physiology and applies the tenets of ergonomics. The focus is to design jobs that minimize physical strain and lessen the incidence of accidents, fatigue, and injury.

Designing for Safety and Health

  • Ergonomics (design for safety and health): Injuries, fatigue, and death on the job can be very costly. Some jobs are designed to maximize worker safety and health.

Ergonomics

  • Study of interface between individuals’ physiology and characteristics of physical work environment.
  • Goal is to minimize physical strain on the worker by structuring physical work environment around the way the human body works.
  • Redesigning work to make it more worker-friendly can lead to increased efficiencies.
  • Use of mobile devices can result in RSIs.

Office Ergonomics

  • Proper posture and workstation setup to minimize strain and discomfort.

Ergonomically Designed Chair

  • Features that promote comfort, support, and adjustability.

Job Design Trade-offs

  • Job design entails trade-offs. No single design can achieve all possible desirable outcomes (e.g., maximum efficiency, maximum job satisfaction, reduced cognitive load/low error rates, reduced physical strain). The situation/contingencies must be evaluated by management. For example, organizationally, what is most important: reliability or efficiency? (Different organizations will set different priorities, and the same organization may set different priorities at different times and when confronting different circumstances--SWOT.) Once the appropriate priority is determined, then design the job accordingly. To accomplish the same outcome (e.g., produce an automobile) two organizations may design the necessary jobs differently (equifinality!). Job design is a conscious, deliberate management process, and should be aligned strategically with the organization’s mission driven goals and objectives.

Management Decisions and Tradeoffs

  • Because jobs can’t be designed to maximize all possible outcomes, managers must make choices and tradeoffs when designing jobs. These decisions should be driven by the strategic goals of the organization, as well as the contingent factors that each manager faces.
  • As a result different organizations in the same industry may decide to design jobs very differently from each other.