Job Design

Early Work on Job Design

Most of the early ideas about job design originated in work by industrial engineers such as Frederick Taylor. Taylor and his associates were primarily concerned with maximizing the productive efficiency of employees by structuring jobs so that any unnecessary work was eliminated and the quickest and most practical work methods were standardized for all employees who performed the same job. By standardizing and simplifying work, the prerequisite qualifications for a job are reduced, and worker efficiency is maximized because all resources needed to complete a task can be centrally located.

The industrial engineering approach to job design gained tremendous popularity in many organizations during the first six decades of the 20th century. Yet despite the popularity, early research showed that employees were often very unhappy with standardized, simplified work. Employees often were late to work or restricted their productivity on such jobs, or they sabotaged their work or equipment, resulting in productivity losses. As a result, the gains in productive efficiency that were expected by early industrial engineers were more than offset by the losses incurred when these engineering principles were implemented.

To address problems that resulted from job simplification and standardization, behavioral scientists began considering ways to redesign jobs by expanding both their content and scope. Much of this early work was based on ideas developed by Frederick Herzberg, who argued that the primary determinants of employee productivity and satisfaction were factors intrinsic to the work itself, often referred to as motivators. These motivators included recognition, achievement, responsibility, advancement, and personal growth in competence. Redesigning a job by increasing its standing on these motivators was expected to lead to beneficial outcomes, including enhanced productivity and employee satisfaction. The results of several research projects provided some support for these arguments.

However, despite its merits, there were several difficulties with the Herzberg approach that compromised its usefulness. For example, Herzberg did not provide an instrument for measuring the presence or absence of motivators in jobs. Thus, it was difficult to diagnose a job's status on the motivators prior to redesign, or to measure the effects of redesign activities on the job after the changes had been implemented. In addition, Herzberg did not provide for differences in how responsive people would be to jobs with many of the motivators, suggesting that all individuals would respond in the same way. Yet early studies demonstrated that some people respond more positively than others to positions that are responsible and challenging.

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