3. The importance of each skill must be rated.
4. Any other characteristics necessary for performing the job should be identified. These include things such as physical requirements and professional certification.
5. Each skill that has been identified needs to be specifically linked to each job task.
Job enlargement attempts to satisfaction by giving employees a greater variety of things to do. The expansion of the work is, however, considered horizontal, since the employees are not given more responsibility or authority in decision making. Rather, they are merely allowed to do greater number of tasks. Thus, an enlarged job is not as specialized or routine as a job designed according to scientific management, but it may not be any more meaningful.
Job Enrichment: A Motivational Approach
In the past two decades, much work has been directed at changing jobs in more meaningful ways than job enlargement was able to do. Rather than simply increasing the variety of tasks performed by an employee, job enrichment tries to design jobs in way that help incumbents satisfy their needs for growth, recognition, and responsibility. Thus, enrichment differs from enlargement because the job is expanded vertically: employees are given responsibility that might have previously been part of a supervisor’s job.
The notion of satisfying employees’ needs as a way of deigning jobs comes from Frederic Herzberg’s two factor theory of work motivation. His basic idea is that employees will be motivated by jobs that enhance their feelings of selt-worth.
Although there are many different approaches to job enrichment, the job characteristic model is one of the most widely publicized. This model is depicted in Exhibit 6-9. It shows that for a job to lead to desired outcomes it must possess certain “core job dimensions.’’ These include
- Skill variety---degree to which the job requires a variety of different activities in carrying out the work, which involves the use of a number of an individual’s skits and talenets.
- Task identify---degree to which the job requires completion of a “whole” and identifiable piece of work---that is, diung a job from beginning to end with a visible outcome.
- Task significance--- degree to which the job has a substantial impact on the lives or work of other people, whether in the immediate organization or the external environment.
- Autonomy---degree to which the job provides substantial freedom, independence, and discretion to the individual in scheduling the work and in determining the procedures to be the used in carrying it out.
- Feedback---degree to which carrying out the activities required by the job results in the individual’s obtaining direct and clear information about the effectiveness of his or her performance.
If these core dimensions are present in a job, they are expected to create three critical psychological states job incumbents. The key psychological states that are necessary for motivation and satisfaction are:
1. Experienced meaningfulness---degree which the job incumbent experiences work as important, valuable, and worthwhile.
2. Experience responsibility---extent to which the job incumbent feels personally responsible and accountable for the results of the work performed.
3. Knowledge of results---understanding that a job incumbent receives about how effectively he or she is performing the job.
The more these three states are experienced, the more internal work motivation the job incumbent will feel. To the extent that these three states are important to the job incumbent, he or she will then be motivated to perform well and will be satisfied with the job.
As resented in Exhibit 6-9, three dimensions---skill variety. Task identity, and task significance---all contribute to a sense of meaningfulness. Autonomy is directly related to feelings of responsibility. The more control job incumbents feel they have over their jobs, the more they will feel responsible. Feedback is related to knowledge of results. For job incumbents to be internally motivated, they must have a sense of the quality of their performance. This sense comes from feedback.
The job characteristics model describes the relationships that are predicted to exist among four sets of factors---(1) core job dimensions, (2) psychological states, (3) personal and work-related outcomes, and (4) strength of needs. Since different capabilities and needs, it is important to be aware of the potential for individual differences to moderate the linkages shown in Exhibit 6-9. If, for example, a person does not have a strong need for personal growth, then job enrichment will probably have less effect than it would for a person who values personal growth.
Many job enrichment programs have been implemented in the United States and in other countries around the world. After 20 years of research, however, there are no clear answers about effectiveness of enrichment. Generally, studies support the expectation that jobs perceived to process the core dimensions of the job characteristics model are more satisfying. On the other hand, the relationship between the critical psychological states and employees’ reactions to enrichment are not yet fully understood. Research also suggests that increasing the scope of a job beyond certain levels can have detrimental effects on workers.