Mba Organisation Analysis and Control Assignment - “Everyone wants a job that scores high on the job characteristics model. Particularly in relation to the use of new technology, managers should design jobs with this in mind” Discuss.

University Degree Business and Administrative studies

MBA

ORGANISATION ANALYSIS AND

CONTROL ASSIGNMENT

Jonathan Simpson

Contents

Word Count: 2495

“Everyone wants a job that scores high on the job characteristics model. Particularly in relation to the use of new technology, managers should design jobs with this in mind” Discuss.

Whilst problems exist within the present plethora of models constructed to assist with the designing of jobs, the application of the models appears to be one that is becoming increasingly more commonplace. This change can be attributed to the present labour shortages that have heightened corporate awareness of the need to attract and retain skilled and competent employees1, together with an increase in an individual’s understanding of their self-concept and worth2, and a shifting in the demographic epicentre of knowledge within an organisation.3 This shift in knowledge has been particularly evident in the field of technology.

The increased concentration of technical knowledge within the younger members of an organisation is in stark contrast to the changing demographic patterns and cultural influences experienced during the 1990s, which have resulted to an increasingly older workforce.4 Given this growth in the size of an older workforce, together with an increase in the reliance of organisations on the implementation and use of new technology in the workplace and socio-economic changes, there has emerged a growing voice calling for ‘all jobs to be designed with high job characteristic scores, particularly those which involve the use of new technology’. It is this statement and its validity that will be the focus of this paper. In testing this, it is important that the term ‘new technology’ be defined. For the purpose of this paper it broadly encompasses, “the physical elements or aspects of machines, processes and work layout involved in the transformation process, and the methods, systems and procedures involved in the performance of the work activities of the organisation”.5

The present process of job design bears little resemblance to that of the past. In 1776, when Adam Smith wrote, The Wealth of Nations, owners and managers were all powerful over their workers. The limited sources of labour, the presence of small local economies, and restrictions on the mobility of labour, combined to ensure that the workers adhered to the requirements of the organisation with little resistance. Little changed until the emergence of the classical approach to organisational design during the early part of the 20th century. Drawing upon the work of Adam Smith and formulated by Taylor and Fayol, organisational theory began to consider, to a limited degree, the needs of the worker. This shift in thinking, however, still maintained the focus on the organisation, and it was not until the human relations approach that the complex needs of the worker were initially acknowledged. Theorists from this school of thought, which included Maslow and McGregor, argued that workers were emotional, their needs being far more diverse and complex than the one-dimensional classical image of Taylor and others. Their conclusions were that intrinsic job motivation and extrinsic rewards, together with communication, were a core aspect of any job and by implication, instrumental to the success of an organisation. Subsequent development of organisational theory, by the works of such theorists as Peters & Waterman, Kanter, and Handy, have progressively acknowledged the importance of the worker to the success of an organisation.6

In the last few decades, many organisational research studies have shown that the presence or absence of certain job characteristics (e.g. job demands and job autonomy) may lead to attitudinal and behavioural reactions, such as job satisfaction7, self-esteem, exhaustion, health complaints, and even illness or disability.8, 9 As a consequence, several theoretical models have been developed to understand the relationship between such job characteristics and employee reactions. In general, these models can be described as situation-centred and person-centred. Situation-centred models focus primarily on explanatory factors or events outside a particular worker, while person-centred models seek explanations in the person whose actions are being studied (e.g. cognitions, habits, feelings, and needs). Two such models are those of the Jobs Characteristics model developed by Hackman and Oldham, and the Job Demand-Control model devised by Karasek.

Whilst these models, and others like them, examine behaviour as a function of a worker’s personality, a given situation, or the environment, they have provided a degree of advancement to understanding the impact of job characteristics on a worker. However, they have also suffered from a highly disorganised and piecemeal approach owing to the different streams of research in this area.10 Furthermore, a lack of consistency in the results recorded has been attributed by scholars to such factors as: distortions caused by the likes of the socio-economic status and health behaviour of the workers, a failing to define accurately ...

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Theorists have advanced many reasons to explain why someone is motivated to work. As a concept, work motivation has been defined as the process by which behaviour is energised, directed, and sustained in organisational settings.12 One early theory that examines different sources of motivation was proposed by deCharmes13, in which he suggests the dichotomy of intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation to characterise the different loci of ‘causality’. Intrinsically motivated behaviours (i.e., those behaviours that occur in the absence of external controls) are said to represent internal causality, whereas behaviours that are induced by external forces are said to represent external causality. A further understanding of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is offered by Katz and Kahn.14 They argue that the basis of motivation can be categorised in terms of legal compliance, external rewards, and internalised motivation. Internalised motivation is further broken down into self-expression, derived directly from role performance, and internalised values, resulting when group or organisational goals become incorporated into the value system of the individual.

The work of these theorists together with others such as, Deci15, pointed to three sources of motivation: intrinsic process motivation, motivation based on goal internalisation, and extrinsic or instrumental motivation. It is the first of these, the intrinsic motivation process, upon which Hackman and Oldham based their job characteristics model16. With this type of motivation, individuals behave in a particular way just because it is ‘fun’. In other words, the motivation comes from the work itself. Individuals enjoy the work and feel rewarded simply by performing the task. There are no external controls regulating the behaviour, and the behaviour that is challenging may be considered enjoyable to some people.

If the statement is to hold true, then ‘all’ employees must want to secure perceived ‘fun’ from their work. By ‘all’, it includes every employee from the core, contractual, and flexible workforces of an organisation.17 However, Handy suggests that future organisations will be run by core people at the centre, who properly motivated and having the appropriate skills, can create more added value than a large groups of unthinking, demotivated individuals. Evidence of this appeared in a recent article in which Microsoft’s, “most important employees are not its managers, but its individual programmers (on the face of it, the lowest rung on the organisational chart), who own the company’s only real lasting asset, its knowledge…”.18 Such is the importance attached to retaining these employees that they are permitted to chose how they do their jobs. However, the ages of the programmers, 20’s to early 30’s, do not fall in line with the median age in America, which is 35 and rising. This demographic change is also mirrored in Europe and there are other issues concerning the needs of workers beginning to emerge.

A recent study investigating differences in individual adoption and sustained usage of technology in the workplace concluded that age matters. Evidence suggests that age differences in information processing have an impact on older workers’ performance of technology-based tasks.20 There is also significant evidence to suggest that the most critical belief underlying an individual’s attitude toward adopting a new technology in the workplace is that of their perceptions about the usefulness of the technology.21 Younger workers tend to be more focused on job-related outcomes and extrinsic rewards, whilst there is overwhelming evidence that supports a positive correlation between age and overall job satisfaction.22 The qualities of the young: at ease with technology, flexibility, embracing change and risk-taking, would suggest that they would seek a greater usage of new technology in their work.23 However, not all of the 30-, 40- or 50-year-olds exhibit these qualities, perhaps due to changing cognitive structures or the process of life cycle orientation whereby job needs and preference change with age.24 Therefore, the future workplace will, as a consequence of demographic pressure, concentrate on the older worker, seeking to utilise those who are able to embrace technology.25 The fact remains, however, that not all will be seeking such an influence of technology, which mangers will have to ensure they factor for when designing jobs.

Whilst changing demographics are having an immense impact upon what employees seek from their work, the organisational change during the last few decades, expounded by Handy et al, has resulted in contingent workers becoming a sizeable and essential part of the workforce all over the world. In the US, temporary, contractual and part-time employees are estimated to account for between 4.9% to 35% of the labour force.26 The same management gurus who have encouraged this change believe that the core workers will be most successfully motivated intrinsically, whilst contingent workers are expected to respond better to extrinsic rewards such as money. However, in a recent paper published by Allan and Sienko, an alternative view of the perception and motivational properties present in contingent workers is advanced.

The basis for this was the application of the job characteristic model to a sample of workers in the US. According to Hackman and Oldham’s model, five core dimensions (skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback) influence three critical psychological states (experienced meaningfulness of the work, experienced responsibility for the outcomes of the work, and knowledge of the actual results of work activities). These states, in turn, affect four outcome variables (high internal work motivation, high quality work performance, high satisfaction with the work, and low absenteeism and turnover). Three factors moderate the relationship between core characteristics and outcomes; an individual’s growth needs strength, context satisfactions (with pay, job security, co-workers, and supervisors), and knowledge and skill.

High growth need individuals are more likely (or better able) to experience the psychological states when their jobs are high on the core dimensions and will have more positive outcomes, than are individuals with low growth needs. People with high growth need strength and are likely to derive greater satisfaction from jobs that rate high on the job characteristics model. Enriching or enlarging of a job will only have an effect for those people who ‘need’ job autonomy and responsibility. The problems experienced by IBM during the 1950s in the US with job rotation and enlargement programmes foundered when faced with a negative response from workers is an example.27 Therefore, Hackman and Oldham’s work concluded that there are individual differences between people and what perceived rewards they seek from their work.

Whilst there were limitations created by the small sample size of the Allan and Sienko research, the paper concludes that, contrary to some misgivings about the motivation of contingents (because of their lack of job security and more tenuous employment relationship), they may well have growth needs to respond to positively, and be motivated by jobs that provide task identity and feedback. To tap contingents’ full motivation potential, employers should not be reluctant to give them work that assigns responsibility for a whole job, or substantial parts of one, and that offers feedback on how well they are doing. This is especially true for professional and technical workers who can readily find jobs as contingents elsewhere. Also, management should not be content with merely filling contingent jobs with ‘warm’ bodies, but rather should recruit those who have high growth needs, that is, needs for personal growth and development, for worthwhile accomplishment; these are the people most likely to respond favourably to challenging work, which most probably will involve the employment of technology.28

A final issue for job designers is that no longer does the ‘organisation man’ exist who signed on for life. Workers are increasingly seeing themselves as a product to be marketed and positioned in any way and to anyone that benefits them. The old ‘carrot-and-stick’ approach to keeping employees in the fold no longer works, because, especially for the best workers, there is always a juicer carrot or shorter stick somewhere else. The social contract as organisations used to know are in terminal decline. New contracts are being based increasingly on the intrinsic, emotional needs of the worker; these are frequently being set in partnership with the employee and are no longer the primacy of the corporation. This ability to change a way of thinking within organisations has its foundations embedded in the shift towards developing emotional intelligence amongst its workers. In doing so, a greater understanding of an individual’s needs are achieved permitting jobs to be designed based on intrinsic motivation and whilst retaining harmony with the goals of the organisation. This redressing of the power-relationship between organisations and its employees is a slow one. For centuries the organisation were at the epicentre. In the future the workers will hold this position.

In conclusion, the evidence would suggest the statement does not hold true, and that whilst managers would be wise to consider the model when designing a position, not all employees seek work that scores highly against Hackman and Oldham’s job characteristic model. Hackman and Oldham, at the time of designing their model, concluded that whilst some employees possess a high growth need, there were also individuals who did not seek job autonomy or responsibility, and would react negatively to any attempt to either enrich or enlarge their job with such attributes.

Whilst the statement is not true, the difficulty in the identifying workers who possess a high growth need, particularly in the field of technology, is further compounded by complex issues such as; the process of life cycle orientation whereby job needs and preferences change with an employee’s age and whether the individual is a core or contingent worker. Both of these factors can have a profound effect upon the individual worker’s needs from a job at a given time. Managers can no longer assume that older workers do not want to use new technology in their jobs, although there remains considerable evidence that they are less able to adapt to new technology, without a fuller perception and understanding of its value to the task and them. Nor can managers dismiss a contingent worker as being one that is largely motivated by extrinsic rewards, for whom there is little or no intrinsic motivation contained within their work.

Given the need for organisations to be considerably smaller, more flexible and flatter, together with the continuing demographic pressures being experienced, there will be an increasing importance placed on the employment and retention of not only young workers, but also contingent and older workers. The continuing ‘war for talent is banishing a lot of rules’, which will progressively result in, where required, the wants and desires of the individual worker, as expressed by the Hackman and Oldham, shaping the content of their jobs within an organisation.

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