Job Enrichment

Job Enrichment

By: Matías López

Introducción •

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Job enrichment in organizational development, human resources management, and organizational behavior, is the process of giving the employee a wider and higher level scope of responsibilitiy with increased decision making authority. This is the opposite of job enlargement, which simply would not involve greater authority. Instead, it will only have an increased number of duties The terminology used to refer to job enlargement is perhaps in the non-scientific management of personnel labeled "multi-tasking". This perhaps is a violation of one of the key principles of human achievement, namely, concentration of effort. One can perhaps manage and work on a vareity of projects and still practice concentrated effort , but multitasking as it is in the present used is so out of hand that it often prevents an employee from getting done with any thing. Unrully multi-tasking may be a less effective type of job enlargement.

Herzberg’s Theory •

The current practice of job enrichment stemmed from the work of Frederick Herzberg in the 1950s and 1960s. Herzberg's two factor theory argued that job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction are not to be seen as one dimension, but two. Aspects of work that contributed to job satisfaction are called motivators and aspects that contributed to job dissatisfaction are called hygiene factors; hence, the theory is also refereed to as motivator-hygiene theory. Examples of motivators are recognition, achievement, and advancement. Examples of hygiene factors are salary, company policies and working conditions. According to Herzberg's theory, the existance motivators would lead to job satisfaction, but the lack of motivators would not lead to job dissatisfaction, and similarly; hygiene factors affect job dissatisfaction, but not job satisfaction. In general, research has failed to confirm these central aspects of the theory.

Techniques Job enrichment, as a managerial activity includes a three steps technique: 3. 4. 5.

Turn employees' effort into performance Link employees performance directly to reward Make sure the employee wants the reward. How to find out?

1. Turn employee's effort into performance •

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Ensuring that objectives are well-defined and understood by everyone. The overall corporate mission statement should be communicated to all. Individual's goals should also be clear. Each employee should know exactly how she fits into the overall process and be aware of how important her contributions are to the organization and its customers. Providing adequate resources for each employee to perform well. This includes support functions like information technology, communication technology, and personnel training and development. Creating a supportive corporate culture. This includes peer support networks, supportive management, and removing elements that foster mistrust and politicking. Free flow of information. Eliminate secrecy. Provide enough freedom to facilitate job excellence. Encourage and reward employee initiative. Flextime or compressed hours could be offered. Provide adequate recognition, appreciation, and other motivators. Provide skill improvement opportunities. This could include paid education at universities or on the job training. Provide job variety. This can be done by job sharing or job rotation programmes. It may be necessary to re-engineer the job process. This could involve redesigning the physical facility, redesign processes, change technologies, simplification of procedures, elimination of repetitiveness, redesigning authority structures.

2. Link employees performance directly to reward • • • •

Clear definition of the reward is a must Explanation of the link between performance and reward is important Make sure the employee gets the right reward if performs well If reward is not given, explanation is needed

3. Make sure the employee wants the reward. How to find out? •

Ask them

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Use surveys( checklist, listing, questions)

Conclusion •

Job Enrichment is the addition to a job of tasks that increase the amount of employee control or responsibility. It is a vertical expansion of the job as opposed to the horizontal expansion of a job, which is called job enlargement.