Job enrichment
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Job enrichment in organizational development, human resources management, and organizational behavior, is the process of improving work processes and environments so they are more satisfying for employees. Many jobs are monotonous and unrewarding. Workers can feel dissatisfied in their position due to a lack of a challenge, repetitive procedures, or an over-controlled authority structure. Job enrichment tries to eliminate these dysfunctional elements, and bring better performance to the workplace.
The current practice of job enrichment stemmed from the early work of Frederick Herzberg in the 1950s and 60s on job satisfaction (Feder 2000, Mione 2006). Hackman and Oldham later refined the work of Herzberg into the Job Characteristics Model (Hackman & Oldham 1976), which forms the basis of job enrichment today (Mione 2006).
Job enrichment, as a managerial activity includes a three steps technique:
1. Turn employees' effort into performance:
- Ensuring that objectives are well-defined and understood by everyone. The overall corporate mission statement should be communicated to all. Individual's goals should also be clear. Each employee should know exactly how she fits into the overall process and be aware of how important her contributions are to the organization and its customers.
- Providing adequate resources for each employee to perform well. This includes support functions like information technology, communication technology, and personnel training and development.
- Creating a supportive corporate culture. This includes peer support networks, supportive management, and removing elements that foster mistrust and politicking.
- Free flow of information. Eliminate secrecy.
- Provide enough freedom to facilitate job excellence. Encourage and reward employee initiative. Flextime or compressed hours could be offered.
- Provide adequate recognition, appreciation, and other motivators.
- Provide skill improvement opportunities. This could include paid education at universities or on the job training.
- Provide job variety. This can be done by job sharing or job rotation programmes.
- It may be necessary to re-engineer the job process. This could involve redesigning the physical facility, redesign processes, change technologies, simplification of procedures, elimination of repetitiveness, redesigning authority structures.
2. Link employees performance directly to reward:
- Clear definition of the reward is a must
- Explanation of the link between performance and reward is important
- Make sure the employee gets the right reward if performs well
- If reward is not given, explanation is needed
3. Make sure the employee wants the reward. How to find out?
- Ask them
- Use surveys( checklist, listing, questions)
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Feder, B.J. 2000, "F.I. Herzberg, 76, Professor And Management Consultant", New York Times, Feb 1, 2000, pg. C26. Available from: ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2003). [28 October 2006].
- Hackman, J.R. & Oldham, G.R. 1976, 'Motivation through the design of work: Test of a Theory”, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, [Online], vol. 16, no. 2 , pp. 250-279. Available from: Science Direct. [1 November 2006].
- Mione, P. 2006(?), "Job Enrichment", [Online], Available from: <http://edweb.sdsu.edu/people/ARossett/pie/Interventions/jobdesign_1.htm>
