Page 94 - Psychological Management of Individual Performance

work design 73
they are doing meaningful jobs that satisfy their need for growth. At the same time,
because they expect that working hard will lead to doing a good job (Bandura, 1982),
higher-order needs are being fulfilled. One issue with the Job Characteristics Model,
however, is that it posits work performance as part of a set of outcomes including job
satisfactionandinternalworkmotivation,withtheimplicationthattheseoutcomesshould
be positively interrelated. Yet reviews of studies testing these relationships challenge
this assumption. For example, a review of the literature by Iaffaldano and Muchinsky
(1985) showed that the best estimate of the true correlation between job satisfaction
and performance was .17 (see also Podsakoff & Williams, 1986, on this topic). The
low correlation, combined with inconsistent evidence that the core job characteristics
promote performance, does not provide categorical support for the Job Characteristics
Model. However, it might be that the basic principles are correct, but that insufficient
attention has been given to contingency factors that influence the point at which work
design affects employee performance. We return to this issue of contingencies later.
Another key work design theory is the sociotechnical systems (STS) approach.In
contrast to the Job Characteristics Model, which is largely about the design of individual
jobs, the sociotechnical systems approach has implications for the design of groups
of jobs, specifically the design of autonomous work groups. Sociotechnical systems
theory is a broad theory developed at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in
London during the 1950s (e.g., Trist & Bamforth, 1951). One of the core propositions
of this theory is that the social and technical subsystems in organizations should be
designed in parallel with joint optimization of the two. Key principles of socio-technical
systems theory (Cherns, 1976) relevant to work design include that methods of working
should be minimally specified (i.e., method control); that variances in the work processes
(e.g., breakdowns) should be handled at source by the employees rather than controlled
by supervisors or specialists; and that roles should be multi-functional and multi-skilled.
At the group level, these principles result in the design of autonomous work groups
(also called ‘self-managing teams’, ‘self-directed work groups’, or other such terms) in
which multi-skilled team members decide on their own methods of working and manage
as many as possible of the day-to-day problems they encounter, with access to and
authority over the resources needed to get the tasks done.
The sociotechnical systems approach certainly assumes performance gains of auto-
nomous work groups, such as the flexibility gains resulting from multi-skilling or the
efficiency gains resulting from teams responding to problems at the source rather than
waiting for specialists. However, in terms of individual performance, the implications of
sociotechnical systems theory are unclear. Relating socio-technical design to individual
performance is antithetical to the systems approach underlying socio-technical theory,
which necessarily considers the interaction of components beyond the individual level
of analysis, and thus factors outside of any one person’s control (Clegg, 2000). Not
surprisingly, studies that have looked at sociotechnical systems work designs in relation
to performance (e.g., Cohen, Ledford, & Spreitzer, 1996) have often focused on out-
comes such as productivity or perceived effectiveness, both of which are broader than
individual performance.
As well as the Job Characteristics Model and sociotechnical systems theory described
so far, other theoretical perspectives also inform work design research (Parker & Wall,
1998). One that is particularly informative is action theory, a broad theory with a Ger-
man origin (Hacker, Skell, & Straub, 1968; see Frese & Zapf, 1994, for an overview in