Friday, December 30, 2016

JOB ENRICHMENT

Job enrichment aims to maximize the interest and challenge of work by providing the employee with a job that has these characteristics:


● It is a complete piece of work in the sense that the worker can identify a series of tasks or activities that end in a recognizable and definable product.


● It affords the employee as much variety, decision-making responsibility and control as possible in carrying out the work.


● It provides direct feedback through the work itself on how well the employee is doing his or her job.


Job enrichment as proposed by Herzberg (1968) is not just increasing the number or variety of tasks; nor is it the provision of opportunities for job rotation. It is claimed by supporters of job enrichment that these approaches may relieve boredom, but they do not result in positive increases in motivation.


                                                SELF-MANAGING TEAMS


A self-managing team or autonomous work group is allocated an overall task and given discretion over how the work is done. This provides for intrinsic motivation by giving people autonomy and the means to control their work, which will include feedback information. The basis of the autonomous work group approach to job design is socio-technical systems theory, which suggests that the best results are obtained if grouping is such that workers are primarily related to each other by way of task performance and task interdependence. As Emery (1980) has stated:


In designing a social system to efficiently operate a modern capital-intensive plant the key problem is that of creating self-managing groups to man the interface with the technical system.


● enlarges individual jobs to include a wider range of operative skills (multiskilling);

● decides on methods of work and the planning, scheduling and control of work;

● distributes tasks itself among its members.


The advocates of self-managing teams or autonomous work groups claim that this approach offers a more comprehensive view of organizations than the rather simplistic individual motivation theories that underpin job rotation, enlargement and enrichment. Be that as it may, the strength of this system is that it does take account of the social or group factors and the technology as well as the individual motivators.

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