Page 99 - Psychological Management of Individual Performance

78 work design and individual work performance
as knowledge/skill, motivation, and opportunity (Blumberg & Pringle, 1982). In this
section, we describe known and potential psychological mechanisms underpinning the
link between work design and performance according to these three categories of per-
formance determinants. There are also non-psychological mechanisms that can explain
the link between work design and productivity (e.g., efficiency gains, cost savings due
to fewer supervisors, work intensification; Kelly, 1992), but psychological mechanisms
are our focus here.

Motivation
The primary mechanism suggested by the JCM to explain why work design can en-
hance performance is that of motivated effort, or ‘working harder’ (e.g., Campion &
McClelland, 1993; Wall & Martin, 1987). Need satisfaction and expectancy-based mo-
tivational explanations are, respectively, that people work better because they are doing
a meaningful job that satisfies their need for growth, and because they expect that work-
ing hard will lead to good performance which in turn leads to higher-order needs being
fulfilled. There are various similar motivational explanations, for example:

performance is enhanced because people in enriched jobs are less motivated to behave

in dysfunctional ways (e.g., avoiding boring tasks; Berlinger et al., 1988);
job satisfaction is enhanced because employees in enriched jobs feel they are making

better use of their skills (Cordery, Sevastos, & Parker, 1992);
work redesign often encompasses the establishment of motivating goals (Kelly, 1992);

and
work redesign results in closer links between effort, good performance, and valued

rewards (Kelly, 1992).
All of these motivational explanations suggest that work redesign leads to greater moti-
vated effort, which in turn enhances individual work performance.
Another potential motivational mechanism underpinning the link between work design
and performance is proactive motivation (Parker, 2000). This involves not just a willing-
ness to put in more effort, but also a willingness to apply one’s effort in proactive and
flexible ways. In this vein, Porter and Lawler (1968) suggested that an individual’s abil-
ities and traits (i.e., capacity) set the upper limits for performance, while a person’s role
perception (i.e., his definition of successful performance of the job) determines whether
the effort is turned into good performance. If the role perception is inappropriate, this
could result in inappropriate performance (e.g., a police officer who sees her job as fill-
ing jail cells will have many false arrests). Proactive motivation is about having, among
other things, a flexible role orientation in which the employees recognize the need to be
flexible and self-starting to perform their job effectively (Parker, Wall, & Jackson, 1997).
Recent evidence suggests that work redesign can enhance proactive motivation, effec-
tively reversing the ‘learned helplessness’ that has been suggested to arise from long-term
exposure to job simplification (e.g., Karasek & Theorell, 1990). Parker et al. (1997)
showed that when job autonomy was increased, employees developed a flexible and
proactive role orientation. Employees moved away from a narrow ‘that’s not my job’
mentality to an orientation in which they felt responsible for broader problems and recog-
nized the importance of being proactive. Another study demonstrated how job autonomy,
as well as improved communication quality, was associated with greater ‘role breadth