CHAPTER 15

JOB DESIGN

Management: Principles, Processes & Practices

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 Learning Objectives
 Job design
 Its significance to HRM professionals
 Job design related factors that affect work
performance
 Changes that the job design perspective has
undergone change over years
 Issues that job design addresses
 Different approaches to job design
 Implications of viewing an organization from
socio-technical systems model point of view

Management: Principles, Processes & Practices

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 What is ‘job design’?
It requires a stepwise diagnosis of a job to deal
with the following issues
 Task to be performed; content
 How they are to be performed; method and
mechanism
 How many actions are to be performed within the
task; steps involved,
 In what order the actions have to be done ;
sequencing,
 The knowledge skills and attitudes required to
perform the task efficiently and effectively; optimum
performance.

Management: Principles, Processes & Practices

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 Job design also deals with the
administrative issues such as:

 Job rotation
 Job enlargement
 Job enrichment
 Job engineering
 Task/machine pacing
 Work breaks
 Working hours
 Working environment
 Working relationships

Management: Principles, Processes & Practices

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 The growing importance of job
design over the years
 During the 70s, the challenge before HRM professionals
dealing with job designs was to find out how
organizations achieve results in the wake of loss of
productive effort resulting from industrial actions and
absenteeism, increased demand for employee
participation, and imposition of various employee
legislations.
 During the 80s a major change occurred in the working
environment in the form of introduction of new
technologies and a shift in the cost of production in
favour of machines as against workforce leading to the
change in job design perspective.
 During the 90s that a real challenge in terms of
optimum job design and work organization arose to
respond to the fast changing environmental conditions
leading to a greater importance and adopting a new
approach towards job design.

Management: Principles, Processes & Practices

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 Issues addressed by job design
 Work overload
 Work under load
 Repetitiveness leading to drudgery and
adverse effect on productivity
 Work and people isolation
 Multiple shifts
 Managing pending filling-up of vacancies
 excessive working hours
 lack of understanding of the whole job
process
Management: Principles, Processes & Practices
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 Common approaches to job
design

Work Design
Improving (jJob
Performance Engineering)

Job Design
Approaches Focus on Job
Enlargement

Job Rotation
Satisfaction of
Employees Job
Enrichment

Management: Principles, Processes & Practices

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 Job Enlargement
 Job enlargement for a particular task
attempts to enhance the scope of the jobs
to include a variety of tasks that need to
be performed by the individual

Job Rotation
 Job rotation moves employees from one
task to another to add variety and reduce
boredom by allowing them to perform a
variety of tasks

Management: Principles, Processes & Practices

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 Job Enrichment
 Job enrichment, as per Orsburn and Moran
(2000), empower employees to assume greater
responsibility and accountability for planning,
organizing, performing, controlling, and
evaluating their own work

Work Design (job engineering)

 Work design allows employees to understand
and appreciate the linkage between work
methods, layout, and handling procedures as
also the interaction between people and
machines.

Management: Principles, Processes & Practices

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 Socio-technical systems
 The socio-technical systems model views organizations
as organic wholes made up of people with various
competencies and capabilities, i.e., the social system,
that uses machines, tools, and techniques, i.e., the
technical system, to produce goods and services that
are valued by customers.

 This necessitates developing of social and technical

systems in such a way that they become interdependent
in a unified whole to fulfil the demands made on them
by customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders in the
external environment.

Management: Principles, Processes & Practices

© Oxford University Press 2008 All rights reserved