Which concept is defined as a method of job design that increases the range of tasks and duties associated with a job in order to make it more challenging and varied?

Job design refers to what, how much, how many, and the order of the tasks for a job. It organizes the job’s tasks and functionalities for maintaining better relationships among the levels of the organizational chain. Job design is important in management, organizational behavior, and human resource management.

What is Job Design?

Job design is a continuous, systematic process of organizing job-related tasks, responsibilities, functions, and duties.

It integrates content related to a job to achieve specific objectives. The process plays a vital role as it affects the productivity of employees and organizations.

Job design sets the contents of a job, fixes the duties and responsibilities of the job, the methods of doing the job, and the relationships between the job holder (manager) and his superiors, subordinates, and colleagues.

Job design refers to how a set of tasks, or an entire job, is organized.

Job design helps to determine:

what tasks are done,
how the tasks are done,
how many tasks are done, and
in what order the tasks are done.

Job design follows job analyses. It is a fundamental organizational process with many implications for human resources management.

Job design is the next step after job analysis that outlines and organizes tasks and responsibilities associated with a specific job. Job design integrates job responsibilities and qualifications or skills required to perform the same.

Through job design, organizations try to raise productivity levels by offering non-monetary rewards such as greater satisfaction from a sense of personal achievement in meeting the increased challenge and responsibility of one’s work.

The process of putting together various elements to form a job, bearing in mind organizational and individual worker requirements and health, safety, and ergonomics considerations.

The scientific management approach of F. W. Taylor viewed job design as purely mechanical.

Still, the later human relations movement rediscovered the importance of workers’ relationship to their work and stressed job satisfaction.

Job design address problems such as;

work overload,
work under load,
repetitiveness,
limited control over work,
isolation,
shift work,
delays in filling vacant positions,
excessive working hours, and
limited understanding of the whole job process.

Job design involves consciously organizing tasks, duties, and responsibilities into a unit of work to achieve certain objectives.

Features of Good Job Design in Human Resources Management

Good job design accommodates employees’ mental and physical characteristics by paying attention to:

muscular energy such as work/rest schedules or pace of work, and
mental energy, such as boring versus complicated tasks.
allows for employee input; this means employees should have the option to vary activities according to personal needs, work habits, and the circumstances in the workplace,
gives an employee a sense of accomplishment,
includes training, so the employee knows what tasks to do and how to do them correctly,
provides good work/rest schedules,
allows for an adjustment period for physically demanding jobs,
provides feedback to the employees about their performance,
minimizes energy expenditure and force requirements,
balances static and dynamic work.

Job design is an ongoing process. The goal is to make adjustments as conditions or tasks change within the workplace.

10 Factors Affecting Job Design

A well-defined job will make the job interesting and satisfying for the employee. The result is increased performance and productivity.

If a job fails to appear compelling or exciting and leads to employee dissatisfaction, the job must be redesigned based on employee feedback.

Top factors that affect a job design;

1. Organizational Factors Affecting Job Design

Organizational factors that affect job design include work nature or characteristics, workflow, organizational practices, and ergonomics.

Work Nature

There are various job elements, and job design is required to classify tasks into a job or a coherent set of jobs. The various tasks may be planning, executing, monitoring, controlling, etc., and all these are to be considered while designing a job.

Ergonomics

Ergonomics aims to design jobs so that employees’ physical abilities and individual traits are considered to ensure efficiency and productivity.

Workflow

Product and service type often determines the sequence of a workflow. A balance is required between the various product or service processes, and a job design ensures this.

Culture

Organizational culture determines the way tasks are carried out at the workplace. Practices are methods or standards laid out for carrying out a certain task. These practices often affect the job design, especially when the practices are not aligned with the interests of the unions.

2. Environmental Factors Affecting Job Design

Environmental factors affect job design to a considerable extent. These factors include both internal as well as external factors.

They include employee skills and abilities, availability, and socio-economic and cultural prospects.

Employee availability and abilities

Employee skills, abilities, and availability play a crucial role in designing jobs. The factors mentioned above of employees who will perform the job are considered.

Designing a more demanding job and above their skill set will lead to decreased productivity and employee satisfaction.

Socio-economic and cultural expectations

Jobs are nowadays becoming more employee-centered rather than process-centered. They are, therefore, designed to keep the employees into consideration.

In addition, the literacy level among the employees is also on the rise. They now demand jobs that are to their liking and competency and in which they can perform the best.

3. Behavioral Factors Affecting Job Design

Behavioral factors or human factors pertain to human needs and need to be satisfied to ensure productivity at the workplace.

They include elements like autonomy, diversity, feedback, etc. A brief explanation of them is given below:

Autonomy

Employees should work in an open environment rather than one that contains fear. It promotes creativity and independence and leads to increased efficiency.

Feedback

Feedback should be an integral part of the work. Each employee should receive proper feedback about individual work performance.

Diversity

Job variety/diversity should be given due importance while designing a job. A job should have sufficient diversity and variety to remain interesting with every passing day. Repetitive jobs often make work monotonous, which leads to boredom.

Use of Skills and abilities

Jobs should be employee rather than process-centered. Though due emphasis needs to be given to the latter, jobs should be designed so that an employee can fully use his abilities and perform the job effectively.

4 Benefits of Job Design

Employee Input

A good job design enables good job feedback. Employees can choose various tasks per their workplace’s personal and social needs, habits, and circumstances.

Employee Training

Training is an integral part of job design. Contrary to the philosophy of “leave them alone,” job design emphasizes training people to know their job demands and how they should be done.

Work/Rest Schedules

Job design offers good work and rest schedules by clearly defining an individual’s hours in their job.

Adjustments

A good job design allows for physically demanding jobs by minimizing the energy spent doing the job and aligning the human resources requirements.

Job design is a continuous and ever-evolving process aimed at helping employees adjust to workplace changes. The end goal is to reduce dissatisfaction and enhance motivation and employee engagement at the workplace.

5 Techniques of Job Design

Job enlargement, job enrichment, job rotation, and job simplification are the various techniques used in job design exercises.

A well-designed job will encourage a variety of good body positions, have reasonable strength requirements, require a fair amount of mental activity, and help foster achievement and self-esteem.

Achieving good job design involves administrative practices that determine what the employee does, for how long, where, and when, and giving the employees a choice where ever possible.

Job Simplification

Job is simplified or specialized. The job is broken down into small parts, and each part is assigned to an individual.

To be more specific, work simplification is the mechanical pacing of work, repetitive work processes, working only on one part of a product, predetermining tools and techniques, restricting employee interaction, and a few skills requirements.

Work simplification is used when jobs are not specialized.

Job Rotation

Job rotation means systematically moving workers from one job to another.

When incumbents become bored with routine jobs, job rotation is an answer to it. Here jobs remain unchanged, but the incumbents shift from one job to another.

On the positive side, it increases the intrinsic reward potential of a job because of the different skills and abilities needed to perform it.

Workers become more competent in several jobs, know various jobs, and improve the self-image and personal growth.

Further, the worker becomes more valuable to the organization. On the negative side, it may not be much enthusiastic, or efficiency may not be more.

Besides, jobs may not improve the relationships between tasks, while activities and objectives remain unchanged.

Further training costs also rise, and it can also de-motivate intelligent and ambitious trainees who seek specific responsibilities in their chosen specialties.

Job Enlargement

Job enlargement means assigning workers additional same-level activities. Job enlargement changes the jobs to include more and/or different tasks.

It means expanding the number of tasks or duties assigned to a given job. Job enlargement is naturally opposite to work simplification.

Adding more tasks or duties to a job does not mean new skills and abilities are needed. There is only horizontal expansion.

It is with the same skills taking additional responsibilities like extending working hours etc. Job enlargement may involve breaking up the existing work system and redesigning a new work system.

Job Enrichment

Job enrichment is the improvisation of task efficiency and human satisfaction by building into people’s jobs, specifically, greater scope for personal achievement and recognition, more challenging and responsible work, and more opportunities for individual advancement and growth.

An enriched job will have more responsibility, autonomy (vertical enrichment), various tasks (horizontal enrichment), and growth opportunities.

The employee does more planning and controlling with less supervision but more self-evaluation.

Job Reengineering

Reengineering means redesigning a business process so that small multidisciplinary self-managing teams get the task done together, all at once.

Reengineering identifies the desired outcome of a system or subsystem and restructures jobs and even departments to increase performance radically.

Often this is done by eliminating unneeded steps and clustering related responsibilities into one job or team organized around the process.

3 Approaches to Job Design

Human Approach

The human approach to job design emphasizes designing a job around people or employees, not organizational processes.

In other words, it recognizes the need to design jobs that are rewarding (financially and otherwise) and interesting at the same time.

According to this approach, jobs should gratify an individual’s need for recognition, respect, growth, and responsibility.

As popularized by Herzberg’s research, job enrichment is one of the ways in the human approach to job design.

Herzberg classified these factors into two categories – hygiene factors and motivators.

Engineering Approach

The engineering approach was devised by FW Taylors et al. They introduced the task idea that gained prominence over time.

According to this approach, the work or task of each employee is planned by the management a day in advance.

The instructions for the same are sent to each employee, describing the tasks to be undertaken in detail.

The details include the what, how, and when of the task and the time deadlines. The approach is based on the application of scientific principles to job design.

Job Characteristics Approach

Hackman and Oldham popularized the job characteristics approach. According to this approach, there is a direct relationship between job satisfaction and rewards.

They said that employees would be their productive best and committed when rewarded appropriately for their work. They laid down five core dimensions that can be used to describe any job – skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback.

Skill variety: The employees must utilize all their skills and develop new skills while dealing with a job.
Task Identity: The extent to which an identifiable task or piece of work is required to complete the job.
Task Significance: How important is the job to other people, and what impact does it create on their lives?
Autonomy: Does the job offer freedom and independence to individuals performing the same?
Feedback: Is feedback necessary for improving performance?

These are different approaches, but all of them point to more or less the same factors that need to be considered, like interest, efficiency, productivity, motivation, etc.

All these are crucial to effective job design.

6 Problems in Job Design

The job designing process faces six several issues, problems, or barriers.

These alternative work patterns are equally effective in handling an organization’s functions.

Telecommuting / Work from Home

Telecommuting or working from home is considered the best alternative to working from the actual office. The concept of a virtual office is gaining more and more popularity because of its ease and convenience.

Using computer networks, fax machines, telephones, and an internet connection, employees can communicate and perform their job from home.

It eliminates the need to come to an office every day and offers employees the convenience of working in the comfort of their homes.

Though there are lots of advantages associated with this working style, it suffers from many limitations.

It allows employees to stay home and manage their job tasks and functions without being present in the office.

Still, it doesn’t allow them to communicate with other employees and establish relationships with them. They only deal with machines the whole day, thus losing creativity.

Moreover, it is a great hindrance in their way as it does not allow skill up-gradation.

It is the second most preferred alternative to traditional working styles where two or more individuals share a full-time job. They divide the tasks, responsibilities, and compensation according to mutual consent.

Women generally use this option on maternity leave or have family and kids to look after but want to continue their job. These days, organizations are open to this working style where two or more individuals can share a job.

Flexi-Working Hours

These days, organizations allow their employees to work according to the timings that suit them best.

There are 3-4 working schedules, and individuals can choose any of them depending on availability. Employees can work in early hours as well as night hours.

This is good for those individuals who have college or some other engagements during the day or specific hours of the day.

The best part is that, unlike telecommuting, flexible timings give them a chance to communicate with other employees too.

Alternative Work-Patterns

Companies these days allow their employees to work in alternate months or seasons. The concept is not common in India but can be seen in the European and American world of work.

They also have the option of working two to three full days and can relax after that.

According to the latest concept, employees can work a fixed number of hours and attend to their personal needs during the days left.

Techno-stress

Techno-stress is the latest technology to check employees’ performance even when they choose to work from home. Because of the introduction of new machines, their performance can be electronically monitored even when they are not aware of it.

Task Revision

Task revision is nothing but modifying existing work design by reducing or adding new job duties and responsibilities to a specific job.

Job design is the complex flow of events that establish the responsibilities assigned to each organization member and the physical circumstances in which each employee carries out those responsibilities.

There are two primary components of the responsibilities established through job design.

Job content.
Organization responsibilities.

Job content

job content is the set of activities to be performed on the job, including the duties, tasks, and responsibilities to be carried out, the equipment, machines, tools to be used, and the required interactions with others.

Richard Hackman and Greg & Oldham suggest that job content can be viewed in terms of five core job characteristics:

Skill variety is the degree to which a job requires various activities in carrying out the work, involving the use of a member of different skills and talents.
Task identity is the degree to which a job requires completing a whole and identifiable piece of work that is doing a job from beginning to end with a visible outcome.
Task significance is how the job substantially impacts other people’s lives.
Autonomy is the degree to which the job provides substantial freedom, independence, and discretion in scheduling the work and determining the procedures to be used.
Job feedback is the degree to which carrying out the work activities required by the job provides the individual with direct and clear information about the effectiveness of their performance.

Organizational responsibilities

Organization responsibilities attached to the job are the responsibilities of the overall organization that each employee is expected to carry out, such as complying with rules and work schedules.

Examples are filling out timesheets following safety procedures and adhering to the established schedule of the workday. Physical working condition surrounding the job is important.

Examples of working conditions are the extent to which there is comfortable temperature versus extremes of hot or cold, excellent lighting versus poor lighting, or safe condition versus hazardous conditions such as working conditions are part of the design of the job.