Chapter 5

Job Design

  1. Dividing work into jobs
  • What is work?
  • Work is the effort directed toward producing and accomplishing results
  • What is a job?
  • A job can be seen as a grouping of tasks, duties and responsibilities that constitute the total work assignment of employees.
  • When an organisation changes these tasks, duties and responsibilities also change.
  • When Jobs are added together they equal the amount of “work” the organisation needs to have done.
  1. Factors that influence job design
  • Workflow analysis
  • Re-engineering the business processes
  • External organisation factors
  • Internal organisation factors

Workflow Analysis

  • Provides and understanding of how work is being done

Re-engineering business processes

  • Generates the needed changes in the business processes
  • Purpose is to improve activities such as product development, customer services and service delivery.
  • May require work teams, training employees to do more than one job, reorganizing the organisation, simplify workflow and speed up work.

External organisation factors

  • Other factors which also play a major role can include:
  • Environmental uncertainty
  • Available technology
  • Profile of the labour market

Internal factors

  • Management and leadership style
  • Technology available
  1. Designing Jobs

Job design is the manipulation of content, functions and relationships of jobs in ways that both accomplishes organizational goals and satisfy the personal needs of the individual.

  • Job content –
  • Job function -

Three approaches to job design

Specialization Intensive Jobs / Motivation-intensive Jobs / Sociotechnical approach
  • Also called job simplification
  • Characterized by jobs with very few tasks that are repeated often during the workday.
  • Eg call center operators, data entry positions, product support representatives etc.
  • Why companies are dropping specialization?
  1. The problem of overspecialization
Workers feel alienated from work and bosses – hampers what people can do.
  1. Repetition
Repetition leads to boredom
Employees need stimulation and challenges
  1. Mechanical pacing
EE working in assembly line required to work at a certain pace – attention may wonder to anything other than task at hand,
Difficult to determine optimum pace
  1. No end product
EE find it difficult to identify with the end product = little pride
  1. Little social interaction
Little to no time to interact on casual basis with co-workers
Difficult to develop social bonding
  1. No input
Little to no performance review – cannot change the way things are done
  1. Job dimensions
The degree to which a job is highly specialized
Measured by job scope (how long it takes to complete total task) and job depth (how much planning, decision making etc the worker does to complete) /
  • Rearranging work in a way that creates enough interest to motivate workers yet remains simple enough for most members to perform.
  • Advantages:
  • Less absenteeism
  • Higher productivity
  • Less turnover
  • Higher quality levels
  • More ee ideas
  • Greater ee satisfaction
  • Job rotation
The process of shifting and employee (ee) from one job to job.
  • Job enlargement
A change in the scope of a job so as to provide greater variety to a worker
  • Job enrichment
Enhancing the job by adding more meaningful tasks and duties to make the work more rewarding /
  • Based on two premises: that an organisation or work unit is a combined, social-plus-technical system, and that this system is open in relation to its environment.
  • Most popular application of this approach can be found in self-managed work teams (self-directed, self-regulating and high performance work teams such as Delta, Bains, Africa Analysis)
  • Teams are empowered to manage themselves
  • Members are expected to perform more than one job
  • EE tend to be more committed
  • Proved to be an essential element for organizational restructuring / re-engineering
  • Virtual teams use technology to communicate especially when geographically dispersed.
  • Other types of teams:
  • Problem solving teams
Volunteers from departments
Meet 2 hours a week
Discuss quality improvement
Exist for limited period
  • Special purpose teams
Span functional or organizational bountries
Examine complex issues like technologies
Eg ISP Steerco – NGNEC steerco
  1. New organizational approaches
  • Total Quality Management (TQM)
  • Organizational wide approach
  • Focus on the quality of all the processes that lead to a final product or service
  • Requires support from top management
  • Belief that quality is a key of every employees job
  • Key facet of TQM is customer focus
  • Entails empowerment of the workforce
  • Emphasis on team orientation
  • Pitfalls for TQM
  • Improper implementation
  • Lack of support (top management)
  • Insufficient focus on result
  1. Office environment
  • Work environment affects ee morale, productivity and quality, absenteeism and turnover
  • Good idea not always born at a desk, creativity occurs anywhere
  • With the right office environment work will continue even during breaks and meals
  1. Robotics
  • The use of robotics to perform routine tasks
  • Two classes of robotics
  • Anthropomorphic – approximate the appearance and functions of humans
  • Non Anthropomorphic – machine like and have limited functions
  1. Ergonomics
  • Designing EE’s workstation to increase productivity
  • Workstation = equipment used, desk, chair, noise, lighting etc.
  1. Productivity Measures
  • Productivity refers to the quantity or volume produced
  • Can be described as “a measure of the output of goods and services relative to the input of labour, material and equipment”
  • Business prime objective of productivity measurement is to gain the competitive advantage
  • Productivity is the relationship between what is put into a piece of work (input) and what is yielded (output)
  • Three major components of productivity:
  • Utilization – the extent to which we use the resource
  • Efficiency – the rate of conversion while resources are being used
  • Effectiveness – measured in doing the right things eg satisfied customer

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