Management and Organization Behavior

Dr. Leigh Stelzer

REFERENCE OUTLINE: Work Design, W&N, Chapter 18

Objectives:

Understand that Job Design is the situation the workers face every day. Thus, it is a major source of behavior and attitudes.

Leaders can design jobs to increase performance and job satisfaction.

Know the common job design approaches.

Know characteristics of an enriched job, empowerment.

Designing work to increase worker satisfaction and productivity? Job design, job characteristics, space and schedules.

The situation most workers face is essentially mechanistic (bureaucratic) and based on scientific management and the classical principles of organization.

A. Scientific management (primary focus on job design on the shop floor). Taylor, Gilbreths. Job engineering characteristics: job designed by specialists, task specialized, division of labor, performance machine paced or controlled by supervisor, standardization. What role does the worker play? See W&N pp. 12, 743.

Scientific management was supposed to produce the one best way to do a job. What is the meaning of "best"? Productivity? profits? satisfaction? Best for whom? Marx said man in the modern factory is alienated from his labor. Is scientific management a moral or ethical system? Of course it is. Is scientific management practical or productive?

B. Job enrichment and empowerment are alternatives based on the theories of Herzberg, Maslow, McGregor, and Argyris, what I call the Human Resource School. They seek to empower the worker? Do workers want to be empowered? What will be the result?

Are workers empowered by?

  1. Uncertainty: a. Work flow uncertainty? b. Task uncertainty?
  2. Task interdependence: pooled, sequential, reciprocal. Are any of these enriching? Or empowering?
  3. Autonomy. Do integration and interdependence remove discretion? Is this true for reciprocal interdependence?
  4. Vertical loading. Delegating to the worker responsibilities and tasks formerly reserved for management and staff specialists.
  5. Specialization. Distinguish specialization of task from specialization of person. Only the latter empowers. A member of a secretarial pool versus an assigned secretary.
  6. Feedback.

Some alternative work designs and concepts:

  1. Job design, engineering
  2. Job enrichment v. enlargement W&N:p.754 v. rotation
  3. Vertical loading.
  4. TQM, W&N:pp.117, 760
  5. Reengineering, W&N:p.759
  6. Job characteristics model, core characteristics.
  7. Work schedule options: Flextime ; telecommuting
  8. Work space design.
  9. Goal setting.
  10. MBO.
  11. Project and matrix structures.

Know the five core job characteristics associated with job enrichment. W&N:p.737. Why are people with jobs that are high on the core job dimensions generally more motivated, satisfied and productive?

Norway's socio-technical approach stresses industrial democracy. Work place democratization gives workers power (even if all they do is turn a nut). It doesn't matter what stinking job you give the workers as long as they elect (participate in) their fate. I see the socio-technical approach as an effort to balance the needs of the machine (technical approach) and those of the human worker. This leads to humanistic technological designs.

What do you gain by moving jobs into natural work groups?

Jobs that are otherwise devoid of power and responsibility when done by the individual are enriched at the group level. You gain sociability and social information, task identity, feedback, etc.