With Appropriate Examples, Discuss the Concept of Job Design and the Core Dimensions That Define a Job, and Discuss the Pros and Cons of Job Rotation

CHAPTER 7

1. With appropriate examples, discuss the concept of job design and the core dimensions that define a job, and discuss the pros and cons of job rotation.

        Job design is the management function of organizing tasks, duties and responsibilities into a particular job to achieve organization’s objectives. Various technique that used in a job design are job enlargement, job enrichment and job rotation. Job design can be defined by job content, job context, work relationship and line manager. Job content is the actual content of the job should be designed to enable people find their meaningful while job context include factors such as work setting, work technology, and flexible working option. Work relationship means people are more likely to be engaged when they are in trusting, harmonis work setting. Line manager means simply having a well-designed job will count for nothing with an unsupportive line manager who provide no feedback. Core dimensions that define a job are skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feeback. Skill variety is the range of skills abilities needed to perform a job. For example, a painter employed in a construction activity to paint walls. Task identity is doing a complete from beginning to end and identifiable piece of work with a visible and task significance means a job contributes to the overall efforts of the organization. Autonomy is the level of freedom and discretion allowed to an employee over his or her job and feedback is the information sent to a job holder about the effectiveness of their efforts so he may adjust his current and future behaviour to achieve the desired result.

        The pros of job rotation are job rotation reduces the boredom and boost satisfaction. When employees expose themselves to different tasks and function, they tend to boost their level of satisfaction. Job rotation also helps in exploring skills, interests and talents. When employees get opportunity to be exposed to other different operations, they may identify what they are really good at and what they could be enjoying. Besides, job rotation motivates employees to deal with new challenges. It gives rise to a healthier competition inside the organization where everyone wants to do a better job than the others. The cons of job rotation are wastage of time and effort because employee have to work with people belonging to different departments and they might feel uncomfortable with it. Job rotation also leads to a whole lot of stress and anxiety because they are expected to step outside their comfort zone and end up not contributing enough in other department. When it comes to having new colleagues, they find it very hard to just adjust and create all kinds of problems. Moreover, job rotation will cause frequent interruption. A person who is doing a particular job and get it comfortable suddenly finds himself shifted to another job or department. This interrupt the work in both the departments.

2. With examples, discuss the job-design approaches that came from the classical management, behavioural management, and employee/work team-centered perspectives.

Classical management is an engineering approach and developed by Frederick W.Taylor. From the classical management perspectives, the job design focus on planning, standardizing and improving human effort at the operative level to maximize productivity and efficiency. In classical management, the benefits of division of work and specialization are emphasized and the jobs are highly structure and rigidly defined. For example, assembly line manufacturing design is founded on the concept of highly routine and specialized task such as automobile manufacturing plant. As the chassis of the car flows through the assembly line, the workers perform a series of high specialized task that contribute in some way to the production product.

        Behavioural management is an approach that focus on motivation, satisfaction and productivity. From behavioural management perspectives, the job design had more core dimensions to a job compare to classical management. The job design in behavioural management includes job enlargement, job enrichment and job rotation. Job enlargement can broaden job scope and it intend to increase the horizontal tasks and responsibilities associated with a given job. For example, a data-entry clerk’s job could be enlarged by assigning additional job responsibilities such as answering phones, processing payroll forms and providing copying service. The data-entry clerk would be responsible for a greater variety of tasks. Job enrichment provides an employee with more tasks to do as a part of their job, as well as the responsibility and authority needed to complete those additional tasks. For example, En. Ali own a newsletter publishing company, he enrich his assistant editors' jobs by giving an opportunity to move from editing 500-word articles to editing 1,200-word features to increase the depth of their positions. Job rotation involves an employee changing job positions within the same organization and eventually returning to the original position. For example, Ali work as a spot welder on a production line and work 10 hour shifts four days a week. He basically spend his day standing in place applying welds to two specific locations on the product as it moves down the line. Therefore his manager can let Ali get rotated off the line to work in the maintenance department and tool shop, where his tasks are varied, the environment is a bit more comfortable, and he can sit down a significant amount of the time.

        From employee-centered perspectives, all individuals, programs, processes, and systems are focused on helping employees become fully successful. It links the mission of the organization with the needs of the individual by allowing employees to design their work roles to benefit the organization and themselves. For example, manager can assess their employees' level of satisfaction with their supervisors, ensure that all employees are in the right jobs and provide employees with a meaningful voice so they can offer their opinions freely and safely, even when they disagree with management. The management will also recognize employees' contributions to the organization in ways that are meaningful to the individuals involved, hold every manager accountable for helping employees become fully successful and organize team-building activities to strengthen the relationship among employees.

Chapter 8

1. With appropriate examples, discuss the types of organizational structure and the strategic conditions under which each might be appropriate.

        Organizational structure is hierarchical arrangement of lines of authority, communications, rights and duties of an organization. Types of organizational structure includes functional structure, divisional structure, matrix structure and network structure.

        Functional structure is a structure that the organization are grouped based on specialty or functional area. For example, in Microsoft Company, there is one major department which is the programming department, with the other departments being significantly smaller. This was because as Microsoft was a programming company at that time, they wholeheartedly focused on programming. This was a very good organizational structure for a start, and this was one of the things that led Microsoft in the right direction.