Summary Work organization and job design (EBB601B05)
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Course
Work organization and job design (EBB601B05)
Institution
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (RuG)
This is a comprehensive summary of the articles for the year
* I got a 9 with this summary
* The article: A Look Back and Leap Forward: A Review and Synthesis of the individual work performance literature
is not included in this summary.
,Articles
Lecture 1 .................................................................................................................................................. 2
Work Design: Creating Jobs and Roles That Promote Individual Effectiveness .................................. 2
The Work Design Questionnaire (WDQ): Developing and Validating a Comprehensive Measure for
Assessing Job Design and the Nature of Work .................................................................................... 8
One Hundred Years of Work Design Research: Looking Back and Looking Forward ........................ 12
Lecture 2 ................................................................................................................................................ 18
Reader – adapted from Reader Fundamenten van Operations ........................................................ 18
Lecture 3 ................................................................................................................................................ 34
Work Design Influences: A Synthesis of multilevel factors that affect the design of jobs ................ 34
Crafting a job: revisioning employees as active crafters of their work ............................................. 41
Anthropocentric perspective of production before and within Industry 4.0.................................... 46
Automation, Algorithm, and Beyond: Why Work Design Matters More Than Ever in a Digital World
........................................................................................................................................................... 50
Lecture 4 ................................................................................................................................................ 57
Production quality and human factors engineering: A systematic review and theoretical framework
........................................................................................................................................................... 57
Positive lean: merging the science of efficiency with the psychology of work ................................. 61
Visual management in production management: a literature synthesis .......................................... 67
Lecture 5 ................................................................................................................................................ 74
Integrating Motivational, Social, and Contextual Work Design Features: A Meta-Analytic Summary
and Theoretical Extension of the Work Design Literature ................................................................ 74
The theory of purposeful work behavior: the role of personality, higher order goals, and job
characteristics.................................................................................................................................... 80
The person-situation debate revisited: effect of situation strength and trait activation on the
validity of the big five personality traits in predicting job performance........................................... 86
Lecture 6 ................................................................................................................................................ 91
Work design in future industrial production: Transforming towards cyber-physical systems ......... 91
Digitalization of industrial work: development path and prospects ................................................. 97
1
,Lecture 1
Work Design: Creating Jobs and Roles That Promote Individual Effectiveness
John Cordery and Sharon K. Parker
The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Psychology – 2012
Work → a search for meaning, recognition, astonishment. In short for a sort of life rather than a
Monday to Friday sort of feeling. Perhaps immortality too is part of the quest, on a social level, the
collective act of working is what creates and sustains whole communities and shapes cultures.
- Activities engaged in at work thus exert a powerful influence on how people think, feel,
behave, and relate to one another – both in the moment of their enactment and beyond.
o Work activities can be sources of positive or negative experiences.
Work has undergone dramatic changes over the decades in terms of:
• Rapid advances in digital technology – transcended barriers of time, location
• Increasing global competition- outsourcing, restructuring, shift towards service and knowledge =
interpersonal interactions have become more important.
• Demographic characteristics of the workforce within many industries and national economies.
Workplaces in these days are likely to be more divers with respect to the experience and
backgrounds of people performing at work, and that: Jobs are shaped by the interactive effect of:
1. Managerial and engineering choices with respect to work design and technology
2. The knowledge, skills, abilities and outlooks that individuals bring to the job.
Job, role, and work design
Job design → An expanded focus on job and role design has become necessary in order to assess the
impact of changes in technology, work, and patterns work.
The expanded focus offers 3 advantages:
• Recognizes the characteristics content and pattern of work, not only focusing on demands but
also from the dynamic physical, social and organizational context within which work is performed
• Acknowledges the fact that most jobs can be seen as comprising both prescribed and
predetermined task and activities.
• Recognizes that, matching a person to a job is a decision that involves considering not just his or
her capacity to perform particular tasks, but to occupy particular roles.
Work design → as an overacting term to describe the content, structure and organization tasks,
activities and roles that are performed by individuals in work settings.
Historical Perspective on Work Design and Individual Effectiveness
• Adam Smith → Division of labour
o Referring the process of dividing a complex work process into sets of simpler subtasks
and requiring individual workers to specialize in the performance of on of those sets of
activities.
o High level of repetition that his might involve could have deleterious psychological
effects on workers.
2
, • Frank Gilbreth and Frederick Taylor → The principles of Scientific Management
o The benefits of further job specialization, into those involving the executing of simple,
specialized physical task (to be performed by workers) and those involving more complex
‘scientific’ tasks, such as planning, scheduling and the exercise on initiative (to be carried
out by professional managers)
o Overwhelming efficiency benefits → reduced time spent switching between tasks,
increased potential for automation of subtasks, great ease in selecting and training
employees, the development of concentrated expertise, and increased quantity of
output.
o Heightened mental and physical fatigue, boredom, dissatisfaction, and absenteeism
arising in a range of industrial settings where work was design in this manner.
o Seemed powerfully affect by the opportunity for, and nature of, social interactions
embedded in different work designs.
• Socio-technological systems theory → STS
o Broad principles for designing effective organizations, where effectiveness is defined as
the extent to which the functioning of both human and technological subsystems are
mutually reinforcing. → joint optimization
o Technological systems whose operations required high levels of task specialization were
frequently disruptive of important and necessary social relationships, both within and
outside work, as well as denying workers the opportunity to engage in activities they
found meaningful and satisfying.
o Balance between socio-psychological needs of workers on the one hand, and
requirements for effective and efficient operations of technology and equipment on the
other.
o Autonomous groups to control execute work task. Semi-autonomous groups → self-
managing teams, these workgroups whose tasks boundary encompasses the production
of relatively whole unit of work.
This approach to work design differed from the dominant ‘mechanistic’ paradigm in several ways:
• Allowed for degree of individual job specialization
• De-specialized some of the planning and decision-making tasks and roles
• Autonomous workgroup provided increased opportunities for social contract and interaction,
both between members and controlling work activities.
• McGregor → Theory X and Theory Y
o Theory X → which hold that people are immediately lazy, are primarily motivated by
economic rewards, dislike expending effort, prefer to be told what to do, and will avoid
responsibility at all costs.
o Theory Y → Most people have the potential to derive considerable satisfaction from
working and willingly exercise effort, self-control and self-direction at work in pursuit of
goals that matter to them. → and suggested that it was dangerous to create work system
that did not provide worker with such opportunities.
• Motivator-hygiene theory → Herzberg & collegues
o Explicit link between job design and employee motivation and satisfaction.
o Satisfaction at work is caused by the presence of motivators
o Work itself and responsibility while dissatisfaction is caused by hygiene factors
o Job could be enriched → to produce higher levels of employee motivation and
satisfaction enhancing the motivational factors
3
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