Page 101 - Psychological Management of Individual Performance

80 work design and individual work performance
other activities outside of work (e.g., Goiten & Seashore, 1980). Crouter (1984) showed
that participation at work increased women’s desire for participation in decision-making
within the home. These studies are consistent with the idea that work design might,
in some individuals, affect aspects that have traditionally been considered quite stable.
Work design might thus have more profound and long-lasting motivational effects than
we have assumed until now.

Acquisition and development of knowledge and skill
The notion that work design promotes skill acquisition and development is a reasonably
long-standing one. By increasing job variety, for example, individuals learn a broader
array of skills that can be flexibly deployed. The idea that enriched work design can have
cognitive implications has also been around for some time. For example, based on action
theory, Frese and Zapf (1994) argued that job autonomy leads to a process of “intellectual
penetration” (p. 43) from which employees develop a deeper understanding of the task
and its requirements. They suggested: “people who have control can do better because
they can choose adequate strategies to deal with the situation. They can plan ahead, they
are more flexible in case something goes wrong” (p. 77). This resonates with the set of
work design-performance studies by Wall and colleagues reviewed earlier, which show
that work design can result in employees developing more in-depth and anticipatory
knowledge about their work tasks which, in turn, enhances performance.
As well as developing more in-depth knowledge about a particular machine or task, it
is also likely that work design facilitates the development of broader and more integrated
knowledge and perspectives about the entire work system and its context, such as the
requirements of customers, the reasons for supply problems, and how departments coor-
dinate their activities (Parker et al., 1997). Lawler (1992, p. 85), for example, reasoned
that enhancing autonomy promotes improvements in performance “because employees
have a broader perspective on the work process and as a result can catch errors and make
corrections that might have gone undetected in more traditional work designs in which
employees lacked the knowledge to recognize them”. Consistent with these arguments,
Parker and Axtell (2001) showed that job autonomy was associated with greater in-
tegrated understanding (e.g., understanding about other departments, customers, etc.),
which was in turn associated with employees being more able to adopt the perspective
of their internal suppliers.
Finally, it is also possible that work design can, over the long term, affect cognitive
development. In a set of studies investigating this idea, Kohn and Schooler (1978, 1982)
showed that self-directed work leads to an increase in intellectual flexibility (i.e., an
individual’s ability to deal with complex cognitive problems). Schleicher (1973, cited in
Frese & Zapf, 1994) also reported an association between work design and intelligence.
Thus, as well as changing the content of what people know, work design can potentially
lead to changes in the way people structure and organize their knowledge. Put another
way, work design might lead to employees becoming more ‘expert-like’ in the way
they think; for example, the way that knowledge is interrelated, the way they perceive
and represent problems, and the problem-solving strategies they use. Consistent with
this idea, Leach et al. (2000) found that the enhanced feedback associated with work
redesign resulted in novice operators developing greater cognitive complexity (i.e., more
differentiated cognitive structures) about their machinery.