Job Design and Enrichment
One of the most important concerns of personnel managers
in the past several years has been employee productivity and satisfaction.
Personnel managers have realized that an important factor influencing these
areas is the type of work handled by the employee. Job design answers the
questions of how the job is to be performed, who is to perform it and where it
is to be performed. Thus, in a way, job design greatly affects how an employee
feels about a job, how much authority an employee has over the work, how much
decision-making the employee has on the job and how many tasks the employee has
to complete. Managers realize that job design determines their working
relationship with their employees and the relationship among employees
themselves. Job design refers to the way that tasks are combined to form
complete jobs. The early emphasis in management was to design jobs around high
specialization and standardization. During the last thirty years, managers have
realized the importance of designing jobs in a novel, interesting way enhancing
employee satisfaction and productivity. Let us examine these approaches briefly.