Understanding Motivation: the use of Theories. Motivational Theories Groups of Theories, страница 10

Text 3.7 Read the text and

Job Design

Of the many possibilities for practical examples, we shall concentrate on job design. It considers the relationship of individuals to their work. Clearly drawing on the human relations tradition, advocates of motivation through job design argue that performance and satisfaction are both available from good applications.

A human relations-oriented strategy that a manager can use to motivate or­ganization members relates to job design. Job design is the identification and arrangement of tasks, which together form a job. It is clear that boring jobs carried out under harsh conditions are demotivating. At the other extreme, jobs that have too much variety, uncertainty and challenge can also unmotivate if they make inequitable demands on the people who are expected to do them. Good job design seeks the happy medium. It searches for a balance between job demands and the capacity of staff to satisfy them. There are two basic approaches to achieving a balance - matching people to jobs and matching jobs to people.

Matching people to jobs

Industrialisation led to many jobs becoming dominated by technology. Assembly line jobs arose from the search for lower costs in the light of intense competition. Although the growth of automation meant that many of the most repetitive jobs have been mechanised, millions continue to work as automatons. The second industrial revolution creates similar dilemmas as information and communication technologies change jobs. Rubery and Grimshaw show the unclear effects. A pessimistic perspective has jobs being destroyed or becoming more intensive and closely controlled, with pressure to work non-stop. The optimist, however, points to potential up-skilling and reduced effort, with new opportunities and relationships. In the former scenario, people continue to have to fit in.

Given that such unsatisfactory jobs exist, what can managers do to relieve some of their negative consequences? There are three possibilities:

•   Establish clear expectations

During recruitment, the nature of the job should be made clear to candidates. It is better to announce 'the most tedious job in the world' than to lie about enticing possibilities. Personnel managers in car plants find many new line workers leave within months. Those who stay, however, remain for many years. They are comfortable with a simple, predictable job. Unfortunately, knowing in advance whether someone will make the adjustment seems impossible.

•   Job rotation

A movement has existed in the last several decades of American business to make jobs simpler and more specialized in order to increase worker productivity. Theoretically, the aim of this movement was to make workers more productive by enabling them to be more efficient. Perhaps the best example of this movement is the development of the automobile assembly line. There was, however, a negative result from this. As work became simpler and more specialized, it typically became more boring and less satisfying to the individuals performing the jobs. As a result, productivity suffered.