• Explain the relationship between motivation and employee performance.
• Discuss job design, including its evolution and alternative approaches.
• Describe the relationship among participation, empowerment, and motivation.
• Identify and describe key alternative work arrangements.
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• Job Design
– How organizations define and structure jobs
– Properly designed jobs can have a positive impact on the motivation, performance, and job satisfaction of those that perform them.
• Job Specification
– The first widespread model of job design.
• As advocated by scientific management, it can help improve efficiency, but can also promote monotony and boredom.
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• Job Rotation
– Involves systematically moving workers from one job to another to minimize monotony and boredom.
• Negatives
– still leaves workers with narrowly defined, routine jobs
– the workers simply experience several routine and boring jobs instead of just one
• Positives
– a worker rotated through a variety of related jobs acquires a larger set of job skills
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• Job Enlargement (horizontal job loading
– Entails expanding a worker’s job to include tasks previously performed by other workers
• For example, in the assembly of washing machine water pumps, jobs done sequentially by six workers at a conveyor belt were modified so that each worker completed an entire pump alone.
– Unfortunately, job enlargement has failed to have the desired effects.
• Generally, if the entire production sequence consists of simply, easy-to-master tasks, merely doing more of them does not significantly change a worker’s job.
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• Job Enrichment
– Entails giving workers more tasks to perform and more control over how to perform them.
• Job enrichment relies on vertical job loading: not only adding more tasks to a job, as in horizontal loading, but also giving the employee more control over those tasks.
• Mixed Results
– The results on job enrichment programs have been mixed and as a result, it recently has fallen into disfavor among managers.
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•
– Identifies three critical psychological states of people
– Focuses on five motivational properties of tasks
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• If employees experience these states at a sufficiently high level, they are likely to feel good about themselves and respond favorably to their jobs
– Experienced Meaningfulness of the Work
• The degree to which individuals experience their jobs as generally meaningful, valuable, and worthwhile
– Experienced Responsibility for Work Outcomes
• The degree to which individuals feel personally accountable and responsible for the results of their work
– Knowledge of the Results
• The degree to which individuals continuously understand how effectively they are performing the job
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• Oldham suggests that the 3 psychological states are triggered by these 5 job characteristics:
– Skill Variety - The degree to which the job requires a variety of activities that involve different skills and talents
– Task Identity - The degree to which the job has a beginning and end with a tangible outcome
– Task Significance - The degree to which the job affects the lives or work of other people, both in the immediate organization and in the external environment
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• 5 job characteristics (continued):
– Autonomy - The degree to which the job allows the individual substantial freedom, independence, and discretion to schedule the work and determine the procedures for carrying it out
– Feedback - The degree to which the job activities give the individual direct and clear information about the effectiveness of his or her performance
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Reference: From J.R.
Hackman and G.R.
Oldham, “Motivation
Through the Design of
Work: Test of a Theory,” in
Organizational Behavior and Human Performance,
Volume 15, 250-279.
Copyright 1976, Elsevier
Science (USA).
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Reference: J.R. Hackman, G.R. Oldham, R. Janson, and K. Purdy, “A New Stage for Job Enrichment.”
Copyright 1975 by the Regents of the University of California.
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•
– The process of giving employees a voice in making decisions about their own work.
•
– The process of enabling workers to set their own work goals, make decisions, and solve problems within their sphere of responsibility and authority.
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• Human Relations Movement
– Assumed happy and satisfied employees will work harder
– Encouraged worker participation and input
– Viewed employees as valuable human resources
• Techniques and Issues in Empowerment
– Techniques to extend participation beyond traditional areas:
• suggestion boxes
• question-and-answer meetings
• The establishment of work teams
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• Variable Work Schedules
– In a compressed workweek, employees work a full forty-hour week in fewer than the traditional five days.
• Flexible Work Schedules (or flextime)
– Gives employees more control over the hours they work each day
• Job Sharing
– Two or more part-time employees share one fulltime job.
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•
– A work arrangement in which employees spend part of their time working off-site
– By using email, computer networks, and other technology, many employees can maintain close contact with their organizations and do as much work at home as they could in their offices.
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• Many employees like telecommuting because it gives them added flexibility.
– By spending one or two days a week at home, for instance, they have the same kind of flexibility to manage personal activities as the alternatives of flextime or compressed schedules allows.
• Some employees also believe they get more work done at home because they are less likely to be interrupted.
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• Many employees do not thrive under this arrangement.
– Some feel isolated and miss the social interaction of the workplace.
– Others lack the self-control and discipline to walk from the breakfast table to their desk and start work.
• Managers may also encounter coordination difficulties in scheduling meetings and other activities that require face-to-face contact.
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