Work design

Work design (also referred to as job design or task design) is an area of research and practice within industrial and organizational psychology, and is concerned with the "content and organization of one's work tasks, activities, relationships, and responsibilities" (p. 662). Research has demonstrated that work design has important implications for individual employees (e.g., employee engagement, job strain, risk of occupational injury), teams (e.g., how effectively groups co-ordinate their activities), organisations (e.g., productivity, occupational safety and health targets), and society (e.g., utilizing the skills of a population or promoting effective aging). The terms job design and work design are often used interchangeably in psychology and human resource management literature, and the distinction is not always well-defined. A job is typically defined as an aggregation of tasks assigned to individual. However, in addition to executing assigned technical tasks, people at work often engage in a variety of emergent, social, and self-initiated activities. Some researchers have argued that the term job design therefore excludes processes that are initiated by incumbents (e.g., proactivity, job crafting) as well as those that occur at the level of teams (e.g., autonomous work groups). The term work design has been increasingly used to capture this broader perspective. Additionally, deliberate interventions aimed at altering work design are sometimes referred to as work redesign. Such interventions can be initiated by the management of an organization (e.g., job rotation, job enlargement, job enrichment) or by individual workers (e.g., job crafting, role innovation, idiosyncratic deals).

History

Interest in the question of what makes good work was largely initiated during the industrial revolution, when machine-operated work in large factories replaced smaller, craft-based industries. In 1776, Adam Smith popularized the concept of division of labor in his book The Wealth of Nations, which states that dividing production processes into different stages would enable workers to focus on specific tasks, increasing overall productivity. This idea was further developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the late 19th century with his highly influential theory of scientific management (sometimes referred to as Taylorism). Taylor argued that jobs should be broken down into the smallest possible parts and managers should specify the one best way that these tasks should be carried out. Additionally, Taylor believed that maximum efficiency could only be achieved when managers were responsible for planning work while workers were responsible for performing tasks. Scientific management became highly influential during the early 20th century, as the narrow tasks reduced training times and allowed less skilled and therefore cheaper labor to be employed. In 1910, Henry Ford took the ideas of scientific management further, introducing the idea of the automotive assembly line. In Ford's assembly lines, each worker was assigned a specific set of tasks, standing stationary while a mechanical conveyor belt brought the assemblies to the worker. While the assembly line made it possible to manufacture complex products at a fast rate, the jobs were extremely repetitive and workers were almost tied to the line. Researchers began to observe that simplified jobs were negatively affecting employees' mental and physical health, while other negative consequences for organizations such as turnover, strikes, and absenteeism began to be documented. Over time, a field of research within industrial and organizational psychology known as job design, and more recently work design, emerged. Empirical work in the field flourished from the 1960s, and has become ever more relevant with modern technological developments that have changed the fundamental nature of work, such as automation, artificial intelligence, and remote work.

Theoretical perspectives

Job characteristics model

Hackman & Oldham's (1976) job characteristics model is generally considered to be the dominant motivational theory of work design. The model identifies five core job characteristics that affect five work-related outcomes (i.e. motivation, satisfaction, performance, and absenteeism and turnover) through three psychological states (i.e. experienced meaningfulness, experienced responsibility, and knowledge of results):

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