Chapter Six – Job Design
 Understand a definition of job design
 Explain the early importance of engineering
and efficiency to job design
 Define and explain “Taylorism”
 Comprehend the application of “Taylorism”
to criminal justice
 Know the relationship between job
satisfaction, job stress, job burnout and job
design
 Define and explain job design theory
 Comprehend job redesign programs and
their application to criminal justice
organizations
 Explain the relationship between job design
and the community
 Define the “new criminal justice” and its
relationship to job design
 The “deliberate, purposeful planning
of the job including all of its structural
and social aspects and their effect on
the employee” (Hellriegel, Slocum,
and Woodman, 1995).
 Efficiency was initially the most
important concern.
 Other job design objectives, including
“psychological job requirements” are
more widely used now.
o Adequate elbow room
o Chances to learn on the job and to keep on
learning
o An optimal level of variety
o A sense that one’s own work is meaningful
o A desirable future
 For most of the 20th Century the objectives
of job design were:
o Technological improvements, and
o Efficiency of labor.
 Early researchers focused on workers in industrial
processes and attempted to find optimal methods
for getting manual labor done.
 The underlying assumption was that employees
are motivated solely by wages or leisure.
 Fredrick Winslow Taylor was an early pioneer in
job design studies.
 Taylor moved beyond the quantitative concepts in
Scientific Management and focused on increasing
efficiency through work fragmentation.
 Taylor attempted to divide complicated work
processes that were dependent on people into
smaller parts in order to increase the overall
efficiency of the process.
 Taylor’s influence in criminal justice is
considerable.
o Police officers’ jobs are often fragmented and assigned
to non-commissioned employees.
o Increased accountability and bureaucratization may
reduce the professional status of police officers.
o The use of standard classification and electronic
monitoring systems has removed discretion from
probation and parole officers.
o Correctional officer jobs have become highly
circumscribed.
 Recent attention on job design grew out of surveys
indicating sharp declines in job satisfaction.
 There appears to be a disconnect between
employee expectations and the reality of criminal
justice employment.
 Job satisfaction decreases and cynicism increases
after the initial years of employment but often
returns later in life.
 Despite attention on client content issues, job
satisfaction appears to be more affected by
o
o
o
o
o
Boredom,
Excessive demands,
Role conflict,
Role ambiguity, and
A lack of participation in decision making.
 “Administrative issues” appear to cause more job
stress and burnout than other work related issues.
 Applications of Tayor’s job design approach
quickly revealed that the desire for money
and leisure do not fully explain worker
productivity.
 The Human Relations School replaced
Taylor and focused on social attachments.
o Originated in Maslow’s (1943) Hierarchy of
Needs
o Applied by McGregor (1978)
 Modern job design theory can be traced to
Hertzberg’s (1966) Motivation-Hygiene Theory.
o Workers are motivated only after hygiene needs are met
and sources of intrinsic satisfaction are built into jobs.
o Job design is about motivating employees to meet their
higher order needs.
 Later job design theory was influenced by
Hackman and Oldham (1987)
o Increasing certain core job dimensions affects personal
and work outcomes.
 Three approaches to job redesign
o Mass production industries have attempted to reduce or
eliminate assembly lines.
o Continuous process industries have attempted to enrich jobs
through autonomous work groups.
o Service industries have attempted to enrich jobs by
combining work from different parts of the job hierarchy.
 Other innovations
o Flextime
o Job sharing
o Telecommuting
 Although little research has been done, the evidence
suggest job redesign may be effective in the human
service industry.
 Human service workers often are able to enrich their
own jobs by self selecting additional tasks.
 Vertical loading - increasing the responsibilities of
front-line staff
 Assigning limited ‘supervisory’ duties and problem
solving responsibilities to front line staff appears to
increase job satisfaction.
 Team policing programs mirror the autonomous
work groups found in the private sector.
 Community- and Problem-Oriented Policing
programs seem to increase worker satisfaction
because they provide officers with increased
autonomy and a sense of meaningful contribution.
 Allowing innovation appears to increase
productivity among community corrections
workers.
 The community’s input into criminal justice job design
should not be ignored.
 The Americans with Disabilities Act has a profound affect
on the criminal justice system.
o Physical access to the court system
o Fair treatment of disabled criminal justice employees
o Health care benefits
 Job redesign should also be cognizant of demographic
changes.
o A more multicultural workforce
o The Millennial Generation
 “New Criminal Justice” – responding to crime is no
longer possible in an organizational vacuum
(Klofas, Hipple and McGarrell, 2010)
 Crime control is more collaborative and involves
community efforts to be effective.
 Criminal justice agencies will have to open
themselves more to
o Different elements of the community, and
o The scholarly and research communities
 This will require the employment of a more
flexible and highly educated workforce.
 Job training will expand to include analytical
strategies for evaluating programs.
 Criminal justice agencies will become more
structurally flexible.
o Use of ad hoc teams to address specific crime problems
o Elimination of highly structured and bureaucratic
organizations
 Job design is the deliberate and purposeful planning of the
job including all of its structural and social aspects and
their effect on the employee.
 Early attempts at job design involved the application of
scientific principles and focused on worker efficiency.
 “Taylorism” is attributed to Frederick Taylor who believed
in the division of labor, time motion studies and pay as the
primary motivator of employees.
 Utilizing Taylor’s principles, criminal justice work is
designed to maximize the control of employees and
enhance efficiency.
 Job design is critical to reducing burnout, relieving work
stress, and elevating job satisfaction among employees.
 Job design theory has moved past Taylorism to include an
examination of job enlargement and job enrichment.
 How jobs are structured affects organizational
performance.
 Job redesign is an attempt to alter jobs such that
employees have more of a say in how hobs are
accomplished.
 Job design efforts are no longer limited to organizational
settings and must include community concerns.
 The “new criminal justice” focuses on the systematic
collection of information and collaboration with other
agencies and community groups.
 The “new criminal justice will force administrators to
consider changes in a number of ways they do business, in
particular;
o Recruitment
o Training, and
o On-going development activities for employees.
 The City of Bigton has experienced a significant
increase in its population. Most of the new
residents are Muslim and choose to live in Bigton
because of its proximity to a new Mosque and
Islamic Community Center.
 Discuss how this qualitative change in the city’s
population might or might not affect the manner
in which the police perform their duties.