Job Typologies

A frequent need in organizations and organizational research is to classify individual positions or jobs into groups, with each group internally homogeneous in terms of a profile of relevant psychological characteristics (e.g., abilities) and situational characteristics (e.g., job requirements) and at the same time externally distinct from all other groups. A job typology is either an established framework—and several major ones will be reviewed here—or it is derived through analytic procedures applied to data at the individual and/or job level, but in either case job typologies contain groups of jobs that, to a greater or lesser extent, adhere to the aforementioned principle of internal consistency and external distinctiveness. This classification process is similar in spirit to factor analysis, in the sense that it results in a small yet sensible number of groups to simplify and amplify relevant similarities and differences. Rather than serving as an end in itself, however, job classification is a tool that can assist in a whole host of personnel-related functions, such as appraising employee job performance, validating employee selection tests, evaluating jobs, planning career paths, and counseling individuals seeking vocational guidance. There are many practical benefits of grouping jobs effectively. For example, rather than having to develop distinct measures to assess employee performance for each individual job in an organization, job grouping can justify developing measures for a smaller set of job groups. Thus, grouping transforms a potentially cumbersome, costly, and time-consuming task into a more manageable, less expensive, and less time-consuming task that is, one hopes, just as useful. Of course, the practical benefit of reducing the total number of jobs to a manageable and appropriate number of job families depends on theoretical notions of generalizability, first that jobs can be aggregated into job families on characteristics that are relevant across jobs (versus those unique to jobs and job positions), and second that whatever unique information about jobs might be sacrificed through grouping jobs does not adversely affect the purposes to which the resulting job groups are put. Of course, unique job information can serve to supplement the organizing scheme provided by a job taxonomy.