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Samenvatting Work Organization and Job Design (EBB100A05)
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Work Organization and Job Design Summary. In this document, all lectures have been developed and summarized.
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Lecture 1Work is defined as an activity in which a person exerts physical and mental effort to accomplish a
given (set of) task or perform a duty (Groover, 2014).
Work design describes how jobs, tasks, and roles are structured, enacted, and modified, as well as the
impact of these structures, enactments, and modifications on individual, group, and organizational
outcomes (Grant & Parker, 2009).
Or how to divide labor and how to integrate effort (Parker, Van den Broeck & Holman, 2017).
Historical overview of work design research
It all started with Adam Smith, 1776. With his wealth of nations, in which he said that in order to
maximize productivity, you need to divide labour. Which is central in our definition of work and work
design. Everyone need to do what he or she is best at, that you maximize output.
The first work design from academic perspective started in the early 20th century with Fredrick Taylor,
who coined the term scientific management. This initiated work design research.
➢ Taylor’s scientific management
o The core idea behind scientific management is that you want to go for job simplification
and job specialization. Which means that you make the work as simple as you can and you
force people to specialize in this so that they become absolute masters at this one thing
that they have to do continuously.
- Workers perform manual work: repeating single, highly simplified and specialized
activities
- Managers perform mental work: monitoring and rewarding
o This is associated with very impressive productivity effects
- Cheaper, constant output, efficiency, mass production
o Detrimental psychological effects
- Absenteeism, strikes, turnover
o Still widely applied today
____
Besides scientific management research, since 1939 people also researched Job Characteristics
Theory. So besides how we can do things as efficiently as possible, also how can we take into account
all of these detrimental effects. So people started to shift from this scientific management to people.
How you can design work in such a way you do not only enhance efficiency, but also in a way that
takes the employee into account. This is roughly the Job Characteristics Theory approach.
This type of thinking was actually initiated by two theories. First one being McGregor’s Theory X and
Theory Y.
McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y
➢ Two assumptions about people
Theory X. Compares people to children, they do not want to be responsible and acquire constant need
for direction
o Assumes that people are very indolent, passive and unresponsible
- Avoid initiative and responsibility
, - Constant need for direction
- Motivated by economic rewards
o Perform to meet expectations, the best you can expect is that they will perform until the
expectations of the manager are met. You can compare this to the scientific management
method.
Theory Y. Does not assume that workers are like children, but are actually responsible adults who
want to be motivated and want to be satisfied.
o Motivated an satisfied
- Seek initiative and responsibility
- Self-control and self-direction
- Self-motivated to complete tasks
o Workers perform beyond expectations
At roughly the same time, there was Herzberg’s two-factor theory. He identified two types of factors
that contribute to satisfaction of employees
➢ Herzberg’s two-factor theory
o Hygiene factors: the bare minimum that an employee needs to provide
- Company policies, interpersonal relation, supervision, salary, working conditions
- If these conditions are met, then people will not be dissatisfied
o Motivator factors: do not contribute to dissatisfaction, but contribute to satisfaction
- Achievement, advancement, nature of work, recognition, responsibility
- Satisfaction
The main idea behind this theory is that you actually need to strive for job enrichment (so you need to
add more responsibility to jobs, rather than simplifying things), and also enlargement. So this is very
much the antithesis of scientific management.
There is mixed empirical evidence for this. It is mixed in the sense that there are not really any
difference between this hygiene and motivator factors empirically. There is also limited support for
the effects on job satisfaction. But the central assumption definitely holds and has inspired many
other theories.
____
Next we will describe the Job Characteristics Theory (Hackman & Oldham, 1976). This is pretty much
the basis for all of the other theories we will discuss during the course. The idea behind JCT is that in
the end as management and perhaps also as academics, we want to maximize all sorts of personal and
work outcomes. So we want to strive for high quality work performance and to ensure this we need to
also make sure that we have high internal work motivation and high satisfaction with work. How can
you do this?
They identified several critical psychological states. What that means is that people have all sorts of
ideas about how meaningful their work is, how much responsibility they have and also how much
knowledge of the results or how aware of the implications people are of their work. They found that is
that if you can somehow activate these critical
psychological states, so if you can make people experience meaningfulness, responsibility, etc., then
this will increase their motivation and also their satisfaction, ultimately increasing their work
,performance. This is in line with the Theory X and Y and Two factor theory, in the sense that we have
to take the actual human as the employee into account.
They wanted to figure out
how can we influence these
critical psychological states.
What they found were five
core job characteristics, that
you can use to describe work
that influence these critical
psychological states. This is
the core of work design.
These characteristics are:
1. Skill variety
2. Task identity
3. Task significance
4. Autonomy
5. Feedback
Work differs in terms of how much different skills you need to use, how you can identify the task, etc.
What they argued is that these first three characteristics all contribute to how meaningful you think
your work is. Autonomy directly influences how much responsibility you experience. Feedback feeds
back in how aware you are of your work results. So this model in that sense is very nice because it
informs us how we can design work (core job characteristics), it explains what designing work does to
a person (critical psychological states), and it also thereby explains or allows us to predict how we can
maximize the outcomes of the output we desire (personal and work outcomes).
There are also moderators. This are conditions that may change per individual or per situation, that
determine exactly how strong all of these relations are. The idea being that all of the relationships you
see here, are stronger when people actually has growth need strength, context satisfaction and have
the appropriate knowledge and skills. This is the job characteristics model in its entirety when
published originally in 1976.
Growth need strength is something like an ambition to want to develop like a person. The idea being
that if you have this ambition, that some of these relationships are going to be stronger for you.
For example the relationship between getting feedback and learning something, you will do more with
this feedback if you have this ambition. But is a
moderator at multiple linkages in the model.
Motivating Potential Score
It is a very practical model, because it allows us
to calculate ones motivating potential score. This
is not used as much nowadays. It pretty much
says that autonomy and feedback are both
crucial when developing or designing work, more
so than skill variety, task identity and task
significance. It also tells us that if people have no
autonomy or feedback, then the motivating
, potential score will also be 0. Effects are stronger under right (moderator) conditions.
o Strengths Job Characteristics Theory
So a lot of strengths, in the sense that this was the first attempt at being able to define work design.
Which has led to large increase of different characteristics we could study, explaining why (mediators)
these effects work and when (moderators) these effects work. In organizational behaviour are this the
two central questions we are always asking ourselves. There is also substantial empirical evidence.
o Weaknesses Job Characteristics Theory
First, there are all sorts of other variables you could have looked at. Important variables are neglected.
Next, there is limited support for psychological mechanisms. Lastly, there is limited support for
absenteeism, performance and turnover.
____
Sociotechnical Systems and Autonomous Work Groups
The idea behind this is that you want to jointly optimize both social systems (people and people
interactions amongst each other ) and technical systems. It tries to combine human factors with
technology.
There are some pretty clear effects and implications this approach has, namely since this was studies,
you see there is a shift from looking at people individually to seeing people as groups, and more
specifically as group who can self-manage themselves. You don’t have to continuously tell them what
to do, but rather you can form a job and make sure they are able to do the job by themselves and
figure out what the tasks are and how to do them. So you shift autonomy from the manager to the
group, and as we know for the job characteristic model, autonomy is a good thing.
You also make the work more flexible: you allow people to do not only do the one task they are
destined to do, but rather you enrich their jobs and enlarge their jobs, but also you allow the rotation
of jobs. In the sense that within a work group you could do different tasks, you can switch every day,
every week, etc. You can do more things, this is less boring and you can learn more, compared to
when you constantly have to do the same thing. It also comes in handy when an employee is sick for
example, because a lot of employees know how to do the task he was doing.
Autonomous work groups also enhances productivity, quality, satisfaction and lower costs. Especially
in situations that are uncertain. Which means that if it is difficult to plan everything beforehand, then
these teams start to become more effective because they can coordinate themselves on the spot and
determine what needs to be done. Whereas when you have one person deciding everything upfront,
then it is very difficult for this person to actually think through all of the possible scenarios.
➢ Joint optimization of social and technical systems
o Shift to (semi-)autonomous work groups
- Control and execution of work tasks
- Balance socio-psychological needs of workers and requirements for effective and
efficient operation of technology and equipment
o Job enrichment, enlargement, and rotation
- Less boring and learn more
o Enhanced productivity, quality, satisfaction, lower costs
- Most effective in uncertain contexts
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