Question

In the area of job design, how useful are job characteristic models for understanding work motivation? (max 1,000 words)

Answer 1

Defining Job Design

Job design is the systematic and purposeful allocation of tasks to individuals and groups within an organization.

Job Design Overview

Job design is the allocation of specific work tasks to individuals and groups. Allocating jobs and tasks means specifying the contents, method, and relationships of jobs to satisfy technological and organizational requirements, as well as the personal needs of jobholders.

Key Elements of Job Design

To understand job design, it is helpful to identify some key elements and their relationship with job design processes.

A task can be best defined as a piece of assigned work expected to be performed within a certain time. Job designers must strictly and thoroughly identify tasks that need completion.

Motivation describes forces within the individual that account for the level, direction, and persistence of effort expended at work. Individuals need to be compelled, excited, and passionate to do their work. Managers should design jobs that motivate employees.

Resource allocation occurs when an organization decides to appropriate or allocate certain resources to specific jobs, tasks, or dilemmas facing the organization. In job design, it is necessary to identify and structure jobs in a way that uses the company’s resources efficiently. Appropriate resource allocation allows large organizations to foster and develop innovation in their workforce and underscores strategy through distribution.

Reward systems also play a role in job design. Reward systems include compensation, bonuses, raises, job security, benefits, and various other reward methods for employees. An outline or description of reward packages should be established when constructing jobs.

Job Characteristics Theory

The Job Characteristics Theory is a framework for identifying how job characteristics affect job outcomes.

Key Points

The Job Characteristics Theory (JCT), developed by Hackman and Oldham, is widely used as a framework to study how particular job characteristics affect job outcomes, including job satisfaction.

The five job characteristics are skill variety, task variety, task significance, autonomy, and feedback.

Three different psychological states determine how an employee reacts to job characteristics: experienced meaningfulness, experienced responsibility for outcomes, and knowledge of the actual results.

Job outcomes, such as satisfaction and motivation, are the synthesis of core characteristics and psychological states.

Job characteristics model.

Hackman & Oldham (1976) proposed in the JCM that work should be designed to have five core job characteristics (job variety, job autonomy, job feedback, job significance, and job identity), which engender three critical psychological states in individuals—experiencing meaning, feeling responsible for outcomes, and understanding the results of their efforts. In turn, these psychological states were proposed to enhance employees' intrinsic motivation, job satisfaction, and performance, while reducing turnover. Although some more specific propositions of the JCM have not been consistently supported (such as the idea that individuals with a high need for growth will benefit most from the core job characteristics), the central proposition that work characteristics affect attitudinal outcomes has been well established in several meta-analyses. The most recent meta-analysis (Humphrey et al. 2007), of 259 studies, showed that all or most of the five core work characteristics relate to the JCM outcomes of job satisfaction, growth satisfaction, and internal work motivation, as well as to other outcomes such as organizational commitment, coworker satisfaction, burnout, and role perceptions. In addition, experienced meaning was the key psychological state that mediated the relationship between job characteristics and outcomes. These meta-analytic findings—based mostly on studies with cross-sectional research designs—are supported by longitudinal and quasi-experimental studies showing positive effects of job enrichment on attitudes and affective reactions (see the review by Parker & Wall 1998). Longitudinal studies also show that low autonomy and low support increase absence, and that job enrichment can reduce employee turnover.

Expanded Motivational Theories: Proactive, Prosocial, and Other Perspectives

This section extends beyond intrinsic motivation to consider the effect of work design on proactive and prosocial forms of motivation (see also Grant & Parker 2009), as well as on other forms of motivation.

Proactive perspectives on work design.

The JCM is relatively passive in terms of the type of outcomes it considers as well as the presumed causes of work design.

Regarding outcomes, job satisfaction is one of the most popular outcomes of work design, yet satisfaction can be experienced as a form of passive contentment. Likewise, task performance concerns carrying out expected tasks well, but more active types of performance, such as taking initiative and proactively introducing improvements, are considered increasingly important in today's dynamic workplaces. Consequently, scholars have increasingly become concerned with how work design can facilitate more proactive attitudes and behaviors. Parker et al. (2010) argued that work design can promote “can do,” “reason to,” and “energized to” motivational states that in turn stimulate proactivity. Thus, varied and challenging tasks provide employees the opportunity for enactive mastery, which, in turn, cultivates self-efficacy beliefs that they can take charge of their environment (Parker 1998). Enriched jobs also enhance individuals' reason to be proactive, for example, by giving individuals a better appreciation of the impact of their work (Grant 2007) and by promoting flexible role orientations in which individuals feel ownership for broader work goals (Parker et al. 2001). Interestingly, time pressure and situational constraints—which are typically considered to be stressors in work settings—can also generate a reason to be proactive. From a control theory perspective, these stressors signal a mismatch between a desired and an actual situation, which stimulates employees to want to proactively rectify the situation (Fay & Sonnentag 2002). Finally, enriched jobs can promote “energized to” states, such as feelings of enthusiasm and vigor (Parker et al. 2009). A meta-analysis by Tornau & Frese (2013) highlighted the importance of job control and social support in predicting proactive work behavior.

A second proactive perspective relates to the causes of work design. The traditional work design approach assumes that others (e.g., managers) design jobs, or that work design derives from broader organizational and technological choices. However, individuals mold their work characteristics to fit their individual abilities or personalities. Much recent attention has been given to how individuals redesign their own work, for example, through job crafting, proactive work behavior, or obtaining personalized employment arrangements in the form of idiosyncratic deals (Grant & Parker 2009). Groups can also initiate work design change (see, e.g., Leana et al. 2009). Training individuals to proactively craft their work might increase the effectiveness of top-down work redesign efforts by equipping job incumbents with the skills and attitudes to realize the opportunities offered. Knowledge and professional workers might particularly benefit from redesigning their own work, because these individuals typically have more autonomy, higher education, and higher aspiration for career progression and are increasingly subjected to excessive work demands that might require crafting to be manageable (see below). Theoretically, although scholars recognize that individuals' proactivity can shape their work design, the mechanisms by which this process occurs have barely been considered (Grant & Parker 2009).

The above proactive perspectives come together in the idea of a positive spiral, in which work design promotes proactive attitudes and behaviors that, in turn, lead individuals to shape their work design, causing further development of proactive attitudes and behaviors, ad infinitum. In support of such a spiral, Frese et al. (2007) showed that autonomy and job complexity predict control orientation (a motivational state that includes self-efficacy), which predicts personal initiative, which in turn leads to perceptions of autonomy and complexity. Research on the job demands–resources model (see below) is similarly concerned with positive spirals between job resources and personal resources (Demerouti & Bakker 2011). One issue to explore further is how work design might, via such positive spirals, contribute to positive organization-level outcomes, such as organizational innovation or corporate entrepreneurship.

Prosocial motivation and relational work design.

Attention to social and relational aspects of work design has recently gathered pace, in part because of shifts in practice, such as a greater level of collaboration across intra- and interorganizational boundaries (Grant & Parker 2009). A key advance is the relational job design perspective, which focuses on how work structures can provide more or fewer opportunities for employees to interact with others, which in turn affect their motivation, attitudes, and job performance (Grant 2007). In an extension of research on task significance, Grant (2007) argued that when jobs are structured such that incumbents have contact with those who benefit from their work (i.e., beneficiaries, such as clients, customers, and patients), job incumbents empathize with the beneficiaries, which encourages incumbents' effort, persistence, and helping behavior.

A series of studies by Grant and colleagues has supported and extended these ideas. In a field experiment in a call center, callers were given brief contact with a beneficiary—in this case, a scholarship recipient who benefited from funding raised by callers. Compared with controls, these callers spent significantly more time on calls over the next month and vastly increased their average weekly revenue (Grant et al. 2007). In another study, nurses who volunteered to help assemble surgical kits for use in disadvantaged countries met and heard vivid stories from beneficiaries (in this case, health care practitioners who had previously used surgical kits in former war zones). Compared with controls, these nurses had increased prosocial motivation and assembled more kits (Bellé 2013), an effect that was even stronger for individuals high in prosocial motivation at the outset. The positive effects of relational work design are boosted by transformational leadership (Grant 2012b).

A key theoretical contribution of the relational perspective is that work design can activate employees' prosocial motivation, that is, their desire to bring benefit to others. This contrasts with the traditional emphasis on designing work to enhance intrinsic interest in the job. Practically, relational work design can be a path for increasing work meaning when enriched types of work redesign are impossible or politically untenable. It is also likely that different forms of relational work design will suit different contexts. For a sample of doctors who already had frequent contact with patients, structural support was a powerful form of relational work design, albeit one focused on enhancing relationships among employees rather than between employees and their beneficiaries (Parker et al. 2012).

Self-determination theory, regulatory focus, and goal regulation.

Parker & Ohly (2008) incorporated recent developments in motivation theory into their theorizing about work design. One contribution of their model derives from the application of self-determination theory (SDT; see Gagné & Deci 2005) to work design. From a SDT perspective, an individual can experience an unenjoyable task (or task that is not intrinsically motivating) as meaningful because the task is seen as important (identified motivation) and/or because the task is congruent with the individual's values (integrated regulation). Integrated and identified motivation occur when individuals take in external values or regulations through a process of internalization, which is in turn aided by their needs for relatedness and social processes (Gagné & Deci 2005). Work designs such as self-managing teams and relational work design likely exert some of their performance effects via identified and integrated motivation, yet such processes have not been explicitly considered (Parker & Ohly 2008). A further issue relates to the meaning of autonomy. In SDT, autonomy refers to an internalized sense of choice (Gagné & Deci 2005); in the JCM, in contrast, job autonomy refers to actual freedom of choice and discretion in one's job (Hackman & Oldham 1976). As discussed below (see Enabling Bureaucracy), some scholars argue that employees can be motivated even if they lack job autonomy so long as they have a sense of choice through participation in decision making, a concept consistent with the SDT perspective.

Motivational Work Design in Practice

How relevant are motivation perspectives in today's workplaces? Listening to the rhetoric about highly skilled jobs in the knowledge economy, one could be forgiven for assuming that most jobs these days are complex and enriched. Certainly this is true for some sectors and some jobs. However, there continues to be a large (and in some cases growing) number of low-wage, low-quality jobs in advanced and developing economies (Osterman & Shulman 2011). Indeed, evidence in the United States suggests an increasing polarization of job quality—more “good jobs” and more “bad jobs,” with a growing gap between them (Kalleberg 2011). The fifth European Working Conditions Survey, conducted in 2010, of 44,000 workers across 34 European countries, identified more than one-fifth of jobs as having poor intrinsic quality. Examples of poor contemporary work design abound, even in new jobs. For example, weatherization jobs (making houses more energy efficient) in the United States have primarily been designed as low-wage, poor-quality jobs with little opportunity for development (Osterman & Shulman 2011).

Why do poor-quality work designs continue to exist when there is clear evidence about the negative individual consequences of job simplification, as well as considerable evidence about the negative organizational consequences, such as poor performance, absence, and turnover? One could argue that enriched jobs, which have greater compensation and training requirements, are prohibitive in industries in which efficiency and cost effectiveness are key. However, whether deskilled jobs are the optimal economic option in these industries is highly debatable, especially taking into account turnover, absenteeism, and other such costs. Moreover, the long-run social and health costs of these jobs “are real and quantifiable, and they are paid by families and communities” (Osterman & Shulman 2011, p. 144).

The forces that perpetuate job simplification and poor-quality work reside at many levels, which suggests that changing the situation will require insights and action from multiple stakeholders. Globally, the rise of poor-quality jobs is driven by changes in technology and other macroeconomic and social forces (Davis 2010). For example, owing to increased competitive pressure coupled with the decline of unions, organizations can use outsourcing and contingent contracts to design work in ways they might not otherwise have been able to (Osterman & Shulman 2011). Likewise, technology has eradicated many middle-level jobs, leaving low-skilled jobs that cannot be computerized.