Chapter 22

Job Design:  process of deciding on the content of a job in terms of its duties and responsibilities, methods used in carrying out the job, techniques, systems and procedures and relationships existing between the job holder and superiors, subordinates and colleagues.

Organisational influences: include the purpose and objectives of the organisation.

Job design supports the purpose of the organisaon by designing innovative products and providing hospitality and catering services or manufacturing standard kitchen utensils.

Other organisational infliuences include;

• The nature, range and volume of tasks to be performed.
• Ergonomics, how well a job is designed to best fit the physical capabilties of employees.
• The way work is organised, will have an effect on how tasks are designed and carried out.
• Quality standards- jobs should be designed to minimise the risk of errors and ensure the best possible quality standards are met, whether in provision of services or production of goods.
• Speed required by the organisations activities- jobs should be designed to ensure the timeliness of task completion is appropriate to the job e.g A and E - time is most important feature of the job.

•  Technological developments that enable tasks to be perfomed in different ways e.g customer services when enquires are dealt with via email rather than in person or over the telephone.

• General levels of education that influence the availability of certain skills e.g computing.

• social changes for example the nature of customer demand and the expectation of service 24/7.

• employees health, wellbeing and safety - ensuring jobs are designed to  not harm wellbeing and health of employees

• employees need for fair reward and recognition- reflected in appropriately designed perfomance manahment process.

• employees need for job satisfaction- designing jobs that provide meaningful, interesting and challenging work.

• employees need for a good work-life balance- to ensure employees are motivated, stress is minimised and where possible job security is assured.

• employees skills and capabilities- reflected in jobs designed to match and reflect the actual skills and capabilities of employees and potential employees; in addition jobs should be able to accomodate developments in individuals capabilities as they gain more experiene.

The job characteristics model of Hackman and Oldham Indicates that employees will perform well when they are rewarded for the work they do and when that work provides them with satisfaction. 

It is based on the idea that the tasks involved in a job are key to employee motivation.

Essentially indicating that a boring and monotonous job decreases the motivation to perform well, whereas a challenging job enhances more motivation.

The five characterisitics combined into how likely a job is to affect an employees attitude znd behaviours are; 

• skill variety
• task identity
• task significance 
• autonomy 
• feedback

The psychological state means that work should have a meaning for an employee because it is something they can relate to, rather than just a set of movements to be repeated.

• Skill variety- using an appropriate variety of skills and talents; too many might be overwhelming, too few might be boring.
• Task identity- being able to identify with the work at hand as part of a whole, enabling more pride to be taken in the outcome of the work, e.g working as part of a group to complete a whole car, rather than constantly repeating a single process on a production line making cars.
• Task significance- being able to identify the task as contributing significantly to other employees,  a wider group of stakeholders, society at large and to the organisations objectives.

The process of shaping an organisations structure so that it meets the organisations purpose and helps to also deliver its orbjectives.

Changes to organsational desgin and organisational strucuture often result in changes to the other:

• organisational design is a strategy that defines how a company unifies its departments and individuals in order to achieve company objectives

• organisational structure representsthe formal lines of authority and power and the relationship between different people and functions in an organisation- vertically from shop-floor workersthrough supervisors and managers to directors and horizontally between differet functions and people at the same level.

The number of subordinates a manager is required to supervise directly.

If a manager has many subordinates the span of control is said to be wide.

If a manager has relatively few subordinates the span of control is said to be narrow.

The greater degree of similarity in what a group of workers does, the wider the span of control can be. Because people doing the same kind of work it is easier to manager them.

The ideal span is influenced by the industry a particular firm is in.

Organisational Hierachy- The vertical division of authority and accountability in an organisation.

Levels of Hierachy- the number of different supervisory and management levels between the shop floor andthe chief ececutive of the organisation.