2.b.9 Job Enrichment Practices Today PDF

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Graham Rodwell...

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2.b.9. Job Enrichment Practices Today    The previous texts suggested that the Job Characteristics Model, when combined with social factors, is quite successful in predicting work related attitudes and some outcomes, such as subjective performance and intention to quit, even though the correlations with other behaviours and objective performance appeared much lower. However, Hackman and Oldham (1975) did not develop their framework with the main aim of making research predictions. They followed Herzberg (1968) in wanting to promote change in management practices and the organization of work. They wanted organizations to introduce ‘job enrichment’ practices that would improve job characteristics.  There have been many prescriptive theories over the last 50 years promoting organizational change of one form or another. Many of these theories include proposals for improving the experience of work and the involvement of the workers. Alongside these theories a wide range of ‘human resource’ and management practices have developed that are intended to promote a more satisfied, motivated and productive workforce. Sometimes these practices are described as forms of ‘job enrichment’.  To take one example of this, Mohr and Zoghi (2006) analysed data from the Canadian Workplace Survey carried out by Statistics Canada in 1999 and 2001. They described the following as examples of ‘job enrichment’ practices (employee percentage participation in brackets):  Participation in employee surveys (46%) Participation in employee suggestion program (69%) Participation in job rotation (27%) Informed about workplace changes (79%) Member of a task team (16%) Member of a quality circle (26%) Member of a self-directed workgroup (37%) Received classroom training related to work (39%)  Some of these practices may affect job characteristics. For example, being part of a ‘self-directed’ workgroup could increase autonomy, job rotation might increase skill variety and being a member of a task team may increase social factors. It is also possible that being a member of a quality circle could increase task significance. Some of the other practices may be more closely related to factors identified by other theories. For example, training may improve ‘competence’. 

On the other hand, it is hard to see ‘participation in a survey’ or ‘being informed about workplace changes’ as being indicators of an ‘enriched’ job. It seems more plausible that not being asked for information and not being informed about changes are indicators of a job where workers feel as if they are treated as unimportant cogs in a machine. In other words, these could be seen as indicators of an ‘impoverished’ job.  In their analysis, Mohr and Zoghi (2006) found that all these ‘job enrichment’ practices were slightly related to a simple measure of job satisfaction. The 3 practices that were most related to differences in job satisfaction were participation in a task team or quality circle, participation in a suggestion program and being informed about work changes. This is consistent with the suggestion that social factors and ‘meaning’ are important, and also with the idea that the experience of an impoverished job is associated with lower job satisfaction. It is also consistent with the idea that the average effects of these common ‘job enrichment’ practices may be quite small.    References  1975 Hackman J.R., Oldham G., Janson R. and Purdy K. “A New Strategy For Job Enrichment” California Management Review, Summer  1968 Herzberg F. “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees” Harvard Business Review  2006 Mohr R., and Zoghi C “Is job enrichment really enriching?” Working Paper 389 January 2006 US Department of Labor

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