Job Design and Job Enrichment

The job characteristics model identifies five core characteristics of any job: skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback. It further states that the presence of these can result in three critical psychological states: felt meaningfulness, felt responsibility, and knowledge of results. In the following activity, you will read about several workers and determine whether or not their job fulfills these critical psychological states.

The challenge of job design, at least from the organization's perspective, is to find the right combination of efficiency and employee motivation so that work is performed efficiently but employees are engaged and satisfied. Early approaches in job design such as scientific management focused on productivity and a high degree of job specialization. While increasing efficiency, extreme job specialization can have an adverse impact on employee attitudes and motivation. A more modern approach to job design is job enrichment. Job enrichment occurs when employees are given more responsibility for scheduling, coordinating, and planning their own work. While there are various techniques to enrich a job, at the heart of all of them is to give employees more autonomy, which is at the core of empowerment.

For the following persons on the left, read the hints and drag them to the appropriate place in the table.