The Mechanistic Approach
Perceptual-Motor Approach
Noe, Hollenbeck, Gerhart, Wright. Human Resource Management 9e. New York, NY McGraw-Hill 2015.
- The focus is identifying the simplest way to structure work that maximizes efficiency.
- Jobs designed around the concept of specialization, skill simplification, and repetition.
- Scientific management was one of the earliest and best-known statements of this approach so productivity to be maximized by taking this approach to the process of designing jobs.
- This approach resulted in jobs to be designed so that they are very simple and lack any significant meaningfulness.
- This reduces the need for high-quality individuals
- Some cases result in work that is significantly easy.
- Focuses on human mental capabilities and limitations
- Focuses on increasing efficiency, flexibility, and employee productivity.
- Goal is to design jobs in a way that ensures they do not exceed people's mental capabilities and limitations.
- This generally tries to improve reliability, safety, and user reactions by designing jobs to reduce their information-processing requirements.
- One looks for at the least capable worker and then constructs job requirements that an individual of that ability level could meet.
- Recent changes in technological capacities hold the promise of helping to reduce job demands and errors, which in some cases these developments have actually made the problem worse.
Four Approaches in Job Design
-specialization
-skill variety
-work methods autonomy
- The Motivational approach
-decision making autonomy
-task signification
-interdependence
-physical demands
-Ergonomics
-work conditions
-job complexity
-information processing
-equipment use
Biological Approach
Motivational Approach
- Skill Variety: extent to which the job requires a variety of skills to carry out the task.
- Task Identity: degree to which a job requires completing a "whole" piece of work from beginning to end
- Autonomy: degree to which the job allows an individual to make decisions about the way the work will be carried out.
- Feedback: the extent to which a person receives clear information about performance effectiveness from the work itself.
- Task Significance: the extent to which the job has an important impact on the lives of other people
- Comes primarily from biomechanics (study of body movements), work physiology, and occupational medicine.
- Usually referred to as ergonomics.
- Applied in redesigning equipment used in jobs that are physically demanding.
- Aimed at reducing the physical demand on certain jobs so that anyone can perform them. (such as redesigning technology or machinery)
- Redesigning work to make it more worker-friendly also leads to increased efficiencies.
Ergonomics: The interface between individual's physiological characteristics and the physical work environment.
- focuses on job characteristics that affect psychological meaning and motivational potential and attitudinal variables(such as satisfaction) as the most important outcomes of a job design
- "Job Characteristic Model" is used to describe jobs in 5 characteristics: skill variety, task identity, autonomy, feedback, and task significance.
- These 5 characteristics determine the potential of a job by affecting the 3 states of "experienced meaningfulness," "responsibility," and "knowledge of results."
- Emphasizing the motivational approach tend to focus on increasing meaningfulness of jobs.
- Even ork that may not be interesting can be made significant by linking between what workers do and the outcomes of their work.