Job design (or redesign, when changes in existing jobs are involved) consists of three elements. It involves determining the duties and responsibilities inherent in a job, which methods should be used in carrying out that job, and what relationships should exist between the person doing the job and the supervisor, any subordinates, and fellow employees. The objectives are to design jobs in order to help the company perform required tasks in the most productive way possible while also satisfying employee needs for interest, challenge and accomplishment, thereby contributing to their quality of work life.
Redesigning jobs can be appropriate when employees feel they are being given insufficient responsibility. It has been found to work best with jobs that are extremely monotonous, segmented and routine.
It is important to distinguish between two common job design strategies: job enlargement and job enrichment. Job enlargement consists of adding more tasks to an individual job to provide the person doing it with a greater variety of work. It can be thought of as horizontal job loading. It has been suggested, however, that such an approach can merely enlarge the meaninglessness of the job. Adding one meaningless task to another is like adding zero to zero; the result is still zero. Similar analogies can be developed for substituting one task for another.
Job enrichment is concerned with vertical job loading. Typically, work is planned by management, performed by workers, and controlled by management. Job enrichment seeks to build into people's jobs some planning or control or both. In this way, employees perform more challenging work.
In their book, 1 WJ Paul and KJ Robertson saw the goal of job enrichment as improving both task efficiency and human satisfaction. This could be achieved, they felt, by building greater opportunities for personal achievement and recognition into people's jobs.
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