Page 93 - Psychological Management of Individual Performance

72 work design and individual work performance
even employees. More often than not, jobs are designed on the basis of long-standing
assumptions about the need to control employees’ activities. These ‘taken for granted’ as-
sumptions about the way to design work largely derive from ideas developed in late 1800s
and early 1900s, such as the concept of scientific management proposed by Frederick
Taylor (Taylor, 1911). A key concept of Taylorism is that of job simplification, or the
breaking down of jobs into narrow tasks and the removal of employees’ decision-making
responsibilities in an attempt to enhance efficiency and control. Ideas such as job sim-
plification have been very persistent, and pervade the design of work in many modern
organizations.
There are, however, alternative work design choices available to managers and job
designers. Largely as a result of accumulating evidence that job simplification was dis-
satisfying for employees, and even jeopardized their mental health, recommendations
were put forward to ‘redesign’ work. An early recommendation for work redesign was
job rotation (i.e., increasing job variety by having employees move from one task to
another), and another was job enlargement (i.e., increasing job variety by expanding the
job to include additional tasks). However, to replace the employee discretion and auton-
omy that job simplification had removed, job enrichment and autonomous work groups
were proposed to enrich individual jobs and groups of jobs, respectively. The work de-
sign practices of job enrichment and autonomous work groups are closely related to the
major theories of work design, which we now consider.

MAJOR THEORIES OF WORK DESIGN AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS
FOR JOB PERFORMANCE

An early theory of work design was Herzberg, Mausner, and Snyderman’s (1959) Two
Factor Theory, which proposed different determinants of job satisfaction and job dis-
satisfaction. Although important in stimulating research and promoting the practice of
job enrichment, the Two Factor Theory has not stood the test of time (see Parker &
Wall, 1998). More important and popular today is the Job Characteristics Model (JCM;
Hackman & Oldham, 1976), which proposes five core job characteristics as important
for the motivation and performance of employees: skill variety, task identity (completing
a whole piece of work), task significance (a job with meaning and impact on others),
autonomy, and job feedback. These job characteristics are proposed to lead to positive
outcomes (e.g., higher work satisfaction, internal work motivation, work performance,
lower absenteeism and turnover) via three critical psychological states (experienced
meaningfulness, experienced responsibility, and knowledge of results). The model was
held to be particularly applicable to individuals high in growth need strength, that is,
individuals who attach a high degree of importance to challenge and personal develop-
ment. On the whole, the broad propositions of the Job Characteristics Model concerning
a link between work characteristics and outcomes such as job satisfaction have been
supported (Parker & Wall, 1998), and growth need strength has been shown to moder-
ate the relationship between job characteristics and outcomes such as job satisfaction
(e.g., Gerhart, 1987) and activated mood states (Saavedra & Kwun, 2000). However,
other predictions, such as the mediating role of the critical psychological states, have not
been consistently upheld (Oldham, 1996).
In terms of employee performance, the primary mechanism proposed by the Job
Characteristics Model is motivation. Thus, it is assumed that people work harder because