JOB DESIGN THEORY

Job Design Theory

Job Design Theory

Organization is the strength of any business. The more organized and efficient the different components in the business are, the better it functions and produces. Breaking down tasks associated with each component in the system has led to the concept of job design. Job design came about with rapid technological advancements at the turn of the 20th century when mass production and assembly line operations emerged. As jobs continue to become more sophisticated and specialized, the need for an educated and motivated workforce has become indispensable(Herzberg, 2000) .

The main purpose of job design (or re-design) is to increase both employee motivation and productivity (Rush, 1971). Increased productivity can manifest itself in various forms. For example, the focus can be that of improving quality and quantity of goods and services, reduce operation costs, and/or reduce turnover and training costs.

On the other hand, increasing employees' motivation can be achieved through increased job satisfaction. To this end, the Two-Hygiene Theory by Herzberg (1971, as cited in Rush) describes two sets of factors, satisfying and dissatisfying, that affect an employee's self-esteem and opportunity for self-actualization in the workplace (Herzberg, 2000).

By far the most influential person of the time and someone, who has had an impact on management service practice as well as on management thought up to the present day, was F. W. Taylor. Taylor formalized the principles of scientific management, and the fact-finding approach put forward and largely adopted was a replacement for what had been the old rule of thumb (Hackman, 2005).

Objectives of Scientific Management

The four objectives of management under scientific management were as follows:

The development of a science for each element of a man's work to replace the old rule-of-thumb methods.

The scientific selection, training and development of workers instead of allowing them to choose their own tasks and train themselves as best they could.

The development of a spirit of hearty cooperation between workers and management to ensure that work would be carried out in accordance with scientifically devised procedures.

The division of work between workers and the management in almost equal shares, each group taking over the work for which it is best fitted instead of the former condition in which responsibility largely rested with the workers. Self-evident in this philosophy are organizations arranged in a hierarchy, systems of abstract rules and impersonal relationships between staff (Hackman, 2005).

The scientific method of management and job design entails analyzing jobs to determine what the worker does and what the requirements are for the job. After this analysis, the job is designed to ensure that employees will not be asked to perform work beyond their abilities. Another aspect of the scientific method is that jobs are divided into small segments for the worker to perform, a method that works well in establishing expected levels of worker performance (Fried, 2006).

Research on the job characteristics model has found relations between employee perceptions of specific core characteristics inherent in the job's design -- ...