Job Design Practices

Job Design

• A job is a set of tasks performed by one person
• Job Design: the process of assigning tasks to a job, including the interdependency of those tasks with other jobs
• Organization’s Goal: to create jobs that can be performed efficiently yet employees are motivated and engaged

Job Specialization

• Dividing work into separate jobs that include a subset of the tasks required to complete the product or service
• Cycle Time: the time required to complete the task before starting over with a new work unit
• Scientific Management
  • American industrial engineer ^^Frederick Winslow Taylor^^ strongly advocated job specialization
  • Taylor also emphasized person-job matching, training, goal-setting, work incentives
• Evaluating Job Specialization
  • Extreme job specialization adversely affect employee attitudes and motivation. Employee turnover and absenteeism tend to be higher in specialized jobs with very short cycle times
  • Advantages
  • Less time spent in changing activities
  • Lower training costs
  • Job mastered quickly
  • Better person-job matching
  • Disadvantages
  • Job boredom
  • Discontentment pay
  • Higher costs
  • Lower quality
  • Lower motivation

Job Characteristics Model

• Core Job Characteristics
  • The Job Characteristics Model, ^^developed by Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham^^, is a model that shows how to make jobs more motivating. The higher a job scores on each core characteristics, the more it is considered to be enriched
  • Skill Variety: the degree to which jobs include a variety of different activities and involves the use of a number of different skills and talents
  • Task Identity: the degree to which the job requires completion of a “whole” and identifiable piece of work, one that involves doing a job from beginning to end with a visible outcome
  • Task Significance: the degree to which the job is important and involves meaningful contribution to the organization or society in general
  • Autonomy: the degree to which the job gives the employee substantial freedom, independence, and discretion in scheduling the work and determining the procedures used in carrying it out
  • Job Feedback: the degree to which carrying out the work activities provides direct and clear information to the employee regarding how well the job has been done
• Job Design Practices that Motivate
  • Job Rotation: the practice of increasing task variety by periodically moving employees from one job to another that involves different tasks
  • Movement from one job to another/^^cross-training^^
  • Benefits
    • Minimizing repetitive strain injury
    • Multiskills the workforce
    • Potentially reduces job boredom
  • Job Enlargement: broadening the types of tasks performed in a job to make jobs less repetitive and more interesting
  • Adding tasks to a existing job
  • Job Enrichment: the practice of giving employees more responsibility for scheduling, coordinating and planning their own work 
  • Clustering tasks into natural groups
    • Stitching highly interdependent tasks into one job (e.g., video journalist; assembling entire product)
  • Establishing client relationships
    • Directly responsible for specific clients
    • Communicate directly with those clients