Job rotation

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An approach to management development is job rotation where an individual is moved through a schedule of assignments designed to give him or her a breadth of exposure to the entire operation.

Job rotation is also practiced to allow qualified employees to gain more insights into the processes of a company and to increase job satisfaction through job variation.

The term job rotation can also mean the scheduled exchange of persons in offices, especially in public offices, prior to the end of incumbency or the legislative period. This has been practiced by the German green party for some time but has been discontinued.

At the senior management levels, job rotation - frequently referred to as management rotation, is tightly linked with succession planning - developing a pool of people capable of stepping into an existing job. Here the goal is to provide learning experiences which facilitate changes in thinking and perspective equivalent to the "horizon" of the level of the succession planning.

For lower management levels job rotation has normally one of two purposes: promotability or skill enhancement.

In many cases senior managers seem unwilling to risk instability in their units by moving qualified people from jobs where the lower level manager is being successful and reflecting positively on the actions of the senior manager.