SYSCO Corporation, of Houston, Texas, is the largest food marketer and dis- tributor in North America. A major part of its operations involves delivering food to restaurants. To do that, the company receives orders from chefs, and fulfills those orders by loading relevant items from its warehouses onto trucks for delivery to the chefs. Accuracy in delivering exactly what was ordered is critical. Prior to the implementation of a computerized Enterprise Require- ments Planning (ERP) system, warehouse clerks would check items manually to ensure a match between each item on an order sheet and the items actually loaded onto a delivery truck. Not surprisingly, this lead to an unacceptably high error rate, in terms of deliveries relative to orders. Errors increase costs, because separate trips are necessary to redeliver items.
After installation of the ERP system, the jobs of the warehouse clerks changed. They now wore “wrist computers” so that they could match elec- tronically the bar code of each item on an order sheet (e.g., one case of 24-ounce cans of whole black olives) to that on a box of the same merchandise.
An alarm sounded if there was a mismatch, so that the warehouse clerks could correct the problem before the wrong item was loaded onto a delivery truck.
Result: better than 99 percent accuracy in deliveries! Note also how the design of the job of warehouse clerk changed in relation to an important strategic objective: to improve customer service by ensuring that deliveries match orders better than 99 percent of the time. Innovations in technology drove the change in the design of the job, which led directly to decreases in delivery costs.
A SYSCO warehouse worker uses a wrist computer to match merchandise to what was ordered.
Scientific Management—“One Best Way”
Scientific management was the dominant approach to job design in the indus- trial society of the 20th century. Frederick W. Taylor was its prophet and the stopwatch was his bible. 18 Time-and-motion studies were key elements, for they could reveal the most efficient (that is, one best) way to perform work, by minimizing wasteful movements or unnecessary steps. Taylor believed that once the best way to perform work was identified, workers should be selected on the basis of their ability to do the job, they should be trained in the standard way to perform the job, and they should be offered monetary incentives to motivate them to do their best.
This approach to designing work is fully consistent with a cost-leadership business strategy. Design jobs so that they are simple to perform and easily learned. That way the firm can minimize the abilities required to perform the work, minimize training costs, and make turnover less costly. At the same time, however, jobs designed only to maximize efficiency lead to predictable psycho- logical consequences, and these have been well documented. 19 Such jobs often lead to job dissatisfaction, surface attention to work, depersonalization and feelings of alienation (powerlessness, meaninglessness), and frustration for lack of personal growth and success. In the context of automobile assembly-line jobs in the early 1900s, Henry Ford lamented, “Why is it that I always get a whole person when what I really want is a pair of hands?” 20 In today’s (and tomorrow’s) world of work, characteristics of the whole person—cognitive as well as personality—are required to improve continuously the business pro- cesses that satisfy the needs of internal and external customers.
To counter some of the more unpleasant consequences of jobs designed solely to maximize efficiency, researchers turned to job rotation (moving employees from one relatively simple job to another after short time periods ranging from an hour to a day), job enlargement (increasing the number of tasks each employee performs), and job enrichment (increasing each worker’s level of accountability and responsibility). While useful, none resolved all of the job- design problems that modern managers face or explained why failures could be expected to occur. 21 A more recent approach, the job characteristics model, attempted to provide a fuller explanation of the relationship of job character- istics to employee motivation.
As a general matter, jobs may vary from having a relatively narrow range of tasks (often simple, requiring little skill or training to perform them), to jobs that include a broad array of tasks that require multiple skills (e.g., a chief financial officer). Jobs designed with a narrow range of tasks generally focus on efficiency, while those designed with a broad range of tasks often seek to enhance innovation. There are a number of alternative theoretical perspec- tives to designing jobs, from industrial engineering,15 to socio-technical sys- tems design that emphasizes teams and autonomous work groups,16 to ergonomic and human-factors approaches that consider the physical and information- processing requirements of work,17 to high-performance work systems and a job-characteristics approach that emphasizes motivation. We will discuss just two of these to contrast the objectives of efficiency and innovation.
The Job Characteristics Approach to Job Design
J. Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham popularized this approach. It holds that certain job characteristics (skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback) contribute to certain psychological states (meaning- fulness, responsibility, knowledge of results), which lead to important per- sonal and work outcomes (high internal work motivation and satisfaction, high-quality work performance, low absenteeism and turnover). The strength of employees’ need for growth has an important moderating effect, in that those who are not interested in personal growth will not respond positively to changes in core job characteristics. Figure 5–3 illustrates the job character- istics model.
Here are some brief definitions of the core job characteristics in the model.
Skill variety— the extent to which the job requires the employee to use a number of different skills and abilities and to draw on a range of knowledge.
Task identity— the extent to which an employee performs a whole piece of work with an identifiable beginning and end.
Task significance— internal (importance to the organization) as well as external (employees are proud to tell others what they do and where they work).
Autonomy— amount of freedom and control employees have in schedul- ing their work, making decisions, and determining how to accomplish objectives.
Feedback— objective information about progress and performance (e.g., from the work itself, supervisors, an information system)
Figure 5–3 The Hackman- Oldham job characteristics model of job design and work motivation.
Source: Hackman, J. R.,
& Oldham, G. R.
(1976). Motivation through the design of work: Test of a theory.
Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16, 250–279. Used with the permission of Academic Press.
Core job dimensions
Critical psychological states
Personal and work outcomes
High internal work motivation High-quality work
performance High satisfaction
with the work Low absenteeism
and turnover Experienced
meaningfulness of the work
Experienced responsibility for outcomes of the work
Knowledge of the actual results of
work activities Skill variety
Task identity Task significance
Autonomy
Feedback
Employee growth need strength
The critical psychological states can be summarized as follows:
Meaningfulness— the extent to which an employee perceives his or her work to be important, worthwhile, and making a valuable contribution.
Responsibility— the extent to which an employee feels personally respon- sible or accountable for the work being done.
Knowledge of results— information about one’s work performance.
Hackman, Oldham, and their colleagues also provided some practical guide- lines for redesigning jobs, and illustrated their application in a variety of settings. 22
Core job characteristic Guidelines for practice
Skill variety Provide cross-training; expand duties requiring more skills
Task identity Give projects deadlines for completion; form self-contained work modules
Task significance Communicate importance of the job; enhance image of the organization
Autonomy Provide more responsibility and accountability;
empower to make decisions
Feedback Implement information systems; supervisors give objective, immediate information about how employees are doing
The combination of a clear, understandable theory, plus practical guidelines to implement it, have made the job characteristics model a popular approach that has been applied in many well-known companies. Research has found strong support for the linkages between core job dimensions and the critical psychological states, and between these states and the predicted outcomes. 23 Meta-analyses of the job characteristics model have found general support for the model itself as well as for its effects on motivation, satisfaction, and perfor- mance outcomes. 24
Identifying the Work To Be Done and the Personal Characteristics Needed To Do the Work
The scientific-management approach to job design focused on the most effi- cient way to accomplish work tasks, and the job characteristics model focused on enhancing personal and work outcomes from performing work. In order to implement either of those approaches, though, one must be able to specify the work to be done and the personal characteristics (knowledge, skills, abilities, personality characteristics) that are required to do the work. That is the pur- pose of job analysis.
The result of the process of job analysis is a job description (an overall written summary of task requirements) and a job specification (an overall written summary of worker requirements). In the past, such job definitions often tended
to be quite narrow in scope. Today, however, some organizations are beginning to develop behavioral job descriptions. They tend to be more stable, even as technologies and customer needs change. 25
For example, instead of focusing on communication skills, such as writing, speaking, and making presentations, behavioral job descriptions incorporate broader behavioral statements, such as “actively listens, builds trust, and adapts his or her style and tactics to fit the audience.” These behaviors will not change, even as the means of executing them evolve with technology. Instead of being responsible for simple procedures and predictable tasks, workers are now expected to draw inferences and render diagnoses, judgments, and deci- sions, often under severe time constraints. 26
Job specifications should reflect minimally acceptable qualifications for job incumbents. Frequently they do not, reflecting instead a profile of the ideal job incumbent. How are job specifications set? Typically, they are set by consensus among experts—immediate supervisors, job incumbents, and job analysts. 27 Such a procedure is professionally acceptable, but care must be taken to distin- guish between required and desirable qualifications. The term required denotes inflexibility; that is, it is assumed that without this qualification, an individual absolutely would be unable to do the job (e.g., certification or licensure). Desir- able implies flexibility; it is “nice to have” this ability, but it is not a “need to have” (e.g., for some jobs, education or experience requirements). To be sure, required qualifications will exist in almost all jobs, but care must be exercised in establishing them, for such requirements must meet a higher standard.
LEGALITIES