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Hoorcollege 10 & 11 – Artikel: Human centred work design and its roots – laucheAbstract
The purpose of this paper is to provide a concise introduction to the ideas of human centred work
design and their background. Human centred work design is a cover term for empirical research,
theories and tools that have been developed in different European countries (UK, Norway, the
Netherlands, Germany) since the 1960s.
- Some criteria for organisation design that have implications for work design (variance control,
minimal critical specification, information flow) and human values as a design criterion.
- De Sitter’s further development of socio-technical systems also state quality of work as a
criterion for organisation design.
- The Scandinavian tradition emphasised the need for participatory approaches and industrial
democracy.
- Human-centred work design combines different aims:
(1) A normative approach: human-centred work design sees human wellbeing at work as an
indispensible value and treats it as the moral responsibility of employers to look after the
wellbeing of their employees. It provides guidelines for standards of what kind of work
should be acceptable.
(2) A theoretical approach: The concepts and the reasoning behind humancentred work design
are based on theories about goal-directed behaviour, namely Action Regulation Theory. The
rather simplistic ideas of human behaviour from the 1960s, namely behaviourism, were
found not to be very useful in explaining what people do at work where they collectively
engage in an activity aimed at a sometimes far away goal.
(3) A practical approach to assessing the impact of existing and intended condition of carrying
out work. Based on the ideas of human centred work design and action regulation theory,
numerous methods and tools have been developed that enable experts to diagnose the
developmental potential of a given job as well as its potentially detrimental effects on health
and psychological wellbeing.
Normative approach
- Research on unemployment has illustrated why work is not just a source of income. It provides a
time structure and social contact, physical and mental activity, the experience of competence
and mastery and a sense of personal identity. Work matters to people, and it often has a spill-
over effect on non-work activities.
- At the core of sociotechnical systems approaches is the believe that it is desirable, necessary, and
indeed possible to combine efficient organising with taking care of the quality of work.
- Proponents of human centred work design see it as an ethical responsibility of organisations
towards their employees and wider society to provide work that does not simply exploit them
but enables them to grow and learn.
, Theoretical approach
- “What constitutes human work is a matter of subjective judgement based on certain
psychological assumptions”.
- Work is more than stimulus–response: It is a conscious, goal directed effort, often aimed at
complex goals whose realization may lie years in the future.
- Hacker continues to argue that we need a psychological theory of work in order to provide advice
to practitioners. Hacker termed his new theoretical approach Action Regulation Theory.
- Action Regulation Theory aims to overcome behaviourism’s focus on stimulus and response and
focuses on human action as driven by intention.
- Unlike Taylor’s Scientific Management, the ideal is that work should be a connection between
thinking and doing.
- Work activities were seen as part of interrelated web of actions embedded in organisation. In any
complex activity, what the individual does is coordinated with others. Work is also embedded in
societal context as part of societal division of labour and culturally shaped artefacts and
knowledge.
- Hacker proposed action as the core concept of his theory. Actions are driven by a conscious goal.
This goal, sometimes also referred to as the object of an activity, represents the actor’s intention
and the mental anticipation of the outcome: People have an idea of what the result of their work
will look like as they work towards it, and they use this mental model as the internal criterion
against which they check if the outcome is satisfactory.
- Action Regulation Theory builds on two sources:
(1) Early computational models from cognitive psychology conceptualised action as a mental
comparison of what one perceives against a set criterion, which triggers an operation until
the criterion is fulfilled.
(2) Activity Theory, provided a broader idea of how individual actions are embedded in a societal
context and how people learn through the interaction with others and the material world.
- Hacker combined both sources and proposed a model of the psychological process of action
regulation.
- As people go about a goal-oriented activity, they set themselves a goal, they perceive and
analyse the current situation to then decide what needs to be done to achieve the goals, they
execute their plans and seek feedback on whether or not their actions have been successful in
attaining the goal.
- Ideally, work design should resemble this natural human process: The order that a person
receives from a customer or a supervisor should allow sufficient freedom for them to develop
their own goals in relation to the order.
- Work design that resembles this process more closely will be seen as more human centred.
- Sometimes this process is very deliberate and conscious, and people actually draw plans and
update them as necessary (complex task). But Action Regulation Theory implies that the same
process also happens subconsciously when we are doing ordinary tasks.
- There is a hierarchical logic in how tasks are broken down into smaller steps, and a sequential
logic in how tasks depend on each other.
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