Employee Motivation Elements in Job Design

Employee Motivation Elements in task Design institution minimizeIt is obvious that the world is in constant change process. Markets atomic number 18 growing and becoming to a greater extent competitive and dynamic. According to Chartered prove of Personnel and Development (online), the systems and methods that once were effective to hold organisations together atomic number 18 now more than than likely to prevent communication and de egg on employees. Managers now contain to take account of the changing attitudes and expectations of employees. They need to find untried slip means to organising throw so that it allows more flexibility and brings need and subcontract happiness to employees.Robinson, I. (2006) argues that motivate employees produce higher levels of carrying out, are more enthusiastic and move to the organisation. They are bequeathing to use their skills, incisionicipate and contribute to the benefit of the company. By contrast, demotivated employee s are likely to be apathetic and to r all(prenominal) higher levels of absence. It is ego evident that organisational performance is likely to be greater with motivated and booked employees.The concept of joke frame opens a naked as a jaybird perspective to creating a more favour adequate to(p) track down environment in which motivated employees will break and enhance organisational performance.Aims ObjectivesThis projects objectives are the avocationTo identify those specific factors / elements which are considered / used when tropeing air.To produce which concern design factors motivate employees.To establish whether a relationship exists surrounded by employee pauperism and the quality of duty performance.The take of my seek is fundamentally to find out whether the following hypothesis is realH1. The aspects of mull design improve employee motivation and lead to improved employee performance. respondent the following indecisions will help to explore into my national as strong as either prove or overthrow the hypothesis I put one across put forward. These are the followingWhat is business organisation design?What is the inconsistency between Mechanistic and Motivational come neares in job design? are motivation and job performance inter-related?What are the factors of Motivational approach that improve employee motivation?What is the role of IT in job design?Such a study aims offer insight into the changes going around and a pedestal for managers for reflecting on how best reorganise wee to improve performance.Preliminary literary productions reviewThere is a wealth of literature c overing the topic of my research hypothesis. My study of the literature will start with the key question of what job design is and how it meetings employee performance. I will then compare twain distinguishable approaches, mechanistic approach and motivational approach in job design and assess the role of IT in this context.Jobs are created by n ation for people. Whether deliberately or by default, choices are made about which tasks to multitude together to form a job, the extent to which job holders should follow appointive procedures in completing those tasks, how closely the job incumbent will be supervised, and numerous other aspects of the run for. Such choices are the essence of job design, which may thus be defined as the specification of the content and methods of jobs (Wall and Clegg, 1998265-268).Background to job designMechanistic approachThe concept of job design was first used in the late nineteenth century when industrialists much(prenominal) as Taylor or Ford first introduced a scientific approach in management practices (CIPD, online). Their approach consisted of defining clear job roles, suggesting that workers mandatory specific tasks and boundaries to enable organisation to become more creative, effective and efficient. The formula of this approach is that a job is broken down into small and ingen uous tasks that nooky be easily learned and performed. It is assumed that it reconciles the production more efficient (Business Dictionary, online). It aims to achieve maximal job fragmentation to minimise skills essential and job learning clock cartridge holder. Taylor (1914) was one of the first to develop the idea of time and motion studies to identify the most efficient movements during a work task. Workers were selected and accomplished to perform their jobs using Taylors approach and were offered monetary incentive to ensure that they performed to their maximum efficiency. Bloisi (2007) argues that the problem with this approach to job design is that it is too preoccupied with the productiveness and ignores the workers social needs.According to Pickard (2006, in CIPD), in the 1960s, the focus shifted from hard, process-oriented approach to job design emphasizing social behavioural perspective of employees.While scientific management aimed on achieving organisational eff ectiveness through task fragmentation, during the middle part of the twentieth century, there was recognition that motivation would influence organisational performance. The work of Maslow and McGregor advocated that job design could be heavily influenced by understanding and responding to the motivations of individuals. However, it was Herzbergs two-factor theory of motivation and the concept of job enrichment that was to shape the development of job design during the guerrilla half of the last century (Marchington and Wilkinson, 2002).Motivational approachThis new approach, called human beings relations approach (Bloisi, 2007) stems from the assumption that jobs crowd out be designed to rock employee motivation and increase job satisfaction. Herzberg (1993, in Bloisi, 2007) asked two questions What makes you feel strong about your work? and What makes you feel bad? From the answers received, Herzberg come to an endd that the job satisfaction was one of the key elements of m otivational job design. In his two-factor theory he identified hygiene factors and inducing factors. Hygiene factors are referred to practices at work that would cause dissatisfaction, but if corrected would not motivate (i.e. salary, organisations policies, administration and supervision). For drill, if an employee were presumptuousness a laptop computer to do his job, it may stop him to be unhappy because of the lack of the IT, but he would not be motivated to work harder. On the other hand, motivator factors, such as achievement, advancement, growth, recognition, responsibleness and work itself, tend to create satisfaction and positive attitude and discretionary effort of employees (Robinson, 2006).The impact of job design on employee performanceFrom the studies of motivator factors, different job design models were highly- genuine, such as Hackman and Oldhams (1980, in Bloisi, 2007). They developed a job characteristics model that identified the motivational factors of a jo b from the following aspectsSkills variety the variety of skills needed to complete the task.Task identicalness how much of the complete product or service is completed by the worker how much they feel they have ownership of the task.Task substance how beta is the task to the lives of others.Autonomy how much of decision-making role the person has maculation doing a job.Feedback how much feedback an employee is given up about their job performance.The Figure 1 below attests how job characteristics described above impact on censorious psychological states of employees, therefore improving their job satisfaction and performance.Core job Critical psychological Outcomescharacteristics statesSkill varietyJob identityJob signifi dismissceJob autonomyFeedback from jobMeaningfulness of workResponsibility for work answersKnowing the actual results of the work activitiesLess absenteeismLess turnover laid-back satisfactionHigh motivationHigh quality work performanceFigure 1. Job c haracteristics model. radical Adopted from Hackman and Oldham (1980 77).It can be seen from the plot above that when the critical psychological states are high, then employees will have a high level of internal work motivation. This leads to a greater productivity and helps create competitive advantage through people.During the 1990s an change magnitude emphasis on employee empowerment led to high discretion models characterised by individual job enrichment and self-managing teamwork (Huczynski and Buchanan 2001, in CIPD online).Herzberg (Accel, online) suggested the following for the job enrichmentLessen the aver and retain accountability at the same timeIncrease personalized accountability for workGrant special autonomy and authority to employees puddle company reports available to all employees and not exactly to managersIntroduce new and more challenging tasks into the jobEncourage the enrichment of skills and expertise by designate employees to specialized tasks.This app roach aims to involve employees in decision-making processes, planning, organisation and control of work. An example of this can be through self-managed teams, where workers are given a last to achieve but it is their teams that decide how tasks are allocated to achieve their goal.Job revolution can overly be used as part of the motivational approach here, employees are moved from one job to other over time (Bloisi, 2007). When job rotation is used, most of the jobs tend to be similar. However, it can increase skills variety and help boost job identity. The Figure 2 illustrates how job redesign can improve work and make it more pregnant.After the redesign of the cashiers jobs, their new jobs were found to be more motivating and as a result their job performance increased significantly.in the beginning job redesign After job redesignCashiers cashed cheques, process deposits and payments for billsBusiness customers were referred to a crinkle advisersForeign currency transaction were referred to another cashierAuditors ensured transactions balancedErrors were notified to cashiersNo feedback on workloadNo records were kept on who did the transactionsCashiers handled all aspects of the transaction for both business customers and foreign currencyFeedback on errors available immediatelyFeedback on rule book displayed on a computer screenCashiers signed their names to to each one transaction so they were recognised as pickings responsibility for their workFigure 2. How job redesign can make work more efficient and meaningful.Source Bloisi (2007 84). investigate has shown that if work is seen as meaningful and important to the individual then they are likely to be more move to the organisation and more productive.The role of IT in job designDevelopments in technology and increased use of the Internet open a new perspective in organisation and job design. Many employers are developing flexible running(a) patterns using latest technological advances. There ar e great advantages as wellhead as drawbacks to it.Here are slightly examples of how employer and employees can benefit of ITEmployees are encouraged to work more flexibly it means they can work from home.Employees can save money and time on travelling to work.Although employees are physically absent at work, employers can always contact them either by mobile phone or email.Apart from that, organisations safe a huge amount of money on property costs, when some of the workforce is ground at home.Disadvantages of using developed communication technologies at workEmployees are no longer able to switch off from work they work outside their habitual nine-to five dollar bill hours.It can lead to increased employee stress and dissatisfaction, which ultimately leads to less productive work.Despite these obvious disadvantages, the benefits of the use of the communication technology are major. As stated in Bloisi (2007), British Telecom encourages staff to work more flexibly. Following a w orkstyle analysis it now has 7500 of its workforce formally found at home and another 40,000 have remote access. Not only has it saved 180 million in property costs, but also improved productivity by 20-40 per cent.The example above illustrates how flexible working in job design can act as a significant motivator contributing to employee well-being and improved productivity.Methodology get to my research scopeThe scope of my research is to explore the impact of job design on employee motivation and improved performance as its result. This is reflected in my research topic and hypothesis. This topic is of my own interest.Basically the research consists of the following three sequential partsJob design Employee motivation change performanceMy research objectives and questions are designed in a way so that they first explore what job design is secondly, how it can motivate people (Herzberg theory above) thirdly, I studied the model of Hackman and Oldham about the impact of employee motivation on the quality of their task performance (please see above).Research methodologyDefinition Pattron (2009, online) defined research methodology as a highly intellectual human activity used in the investigation of nature and matter and deals specifically with the manner in which data is collected, analysed and interpreted. inessential data collection methodI have conducted a previous literature review to investigate what other authors write about my research topic. All findings in my literature review are meant to serve as a base for comparison with the results of basal data collection. The comparison between the two will help to either prove or disprove my research hypothesis.TheoryHypothesis old ResearchConclusionsThe approach I have adopted for my research is deductive and can be delineated in the diagram as followsFigure 3. Deductive Research Approach.Primary data collection methodWritten questionnaire is the method I have chosen to collect the data. The type of my questionnaire is the Likert Scale (PHS, online) where I have given a scale to indicate the strength of agreement to lines (please see a sample of my questionnaire in the cecal appendage 2 below). The advantage of this type of questionnaire is that it is easier and red-hot for the recipient to complete and also allows direct comparability to answers as well as to assess the feelings of the respondents towards issues.This method ascribes quantitative value to qualitative data, makes it corrigible to statistical analysis. A numerical value is assigned to each say-so choice and the final average score represents general level of exploit or attitude toward the subject matter.This questionnaire is targeted on sample world. Sample population is a number of homogenous respondents who share important characteristics e.g. all occupied and working in a relatively big companies, rather than mercenary(a) or working in small private businesses. It is essential to make the data comparabl e as well as to make conclusions meaningful (PHS, online).Accordingly, I distributed my questionnaires to a number of people working in different organisations but which had one same characteristic employed and working in medium size businesses.Approach to analysis and interpretation of dataThe theories in the literature review above (Hackman and Oldhams Job Characteristics model) have confirmed my research hypothesis which states that there is a link between job design, employee motivation and improved performance.In order to test this theory, I designed my primary data collection (questionnaire questions 1 to 15) so that it fits the following formula actuate Potential ScoreMPS=SkillVariety+Task individuality+Task SignificancexAutonomyxFeedback3Source Hackman Oldham, 198090 in Bloisi, 2007.This formula is a summary of Hackman and Oldhams Job Characteristics model. It measures the overall potential of a job, or Job Satisfaction. It is calculated by taking the average of Skill var iety positivistic Task identity plus Task significance and then multiplying that Average by Autonomy and Feedback.The outcome of jobs with high MPS will be high quality work performance and high worker satisfaction (Hackman Oldham in Bloisi, 2007).I created additional 12 questions, 16 to 27, to identify strong feeling of employee engagement. Results from this part of the questionnaire would show a strong correlation between high lots and sea captain job performance.All answers are accumulated and represented in the give in in the Appendix 1 below. For each of the agree answers 1 point, and for each of disagrees 0 point is ascribed. The averages are calculated as well as MPSs for individual questionnaires.ConclusionsThe objective if this research was to investigate into the impact of job design on employee motivation and performance.The results of the primary data should either prove or disprove the statement made in the research hypothesis.The research was based on 5 dimensions that according to Hackman and Oldham (1980) would help to analyse how jobs were designed.The highest score for the variable star 1 (average 1.93) showed that the majority of the respondents agreed to a certain degree with the statement that their jobs require the variety of skills and abilities. Whereas Task significance and Autonomy had the lowest scores (Appendix 1).MPS has revealed which of these dimensions, that impact total Motivating Potential of a job, can be redesigned so that employees feel more motivated.Additional questions on job performance (16 to 27 and referred as Variable 6 in the Appendix 1), showed the result for the quality of job performance (average score 7.8 out of 12 questions).The research has revealed that job performance score is far greater at those jobs which had higher scores for Task variety, Task significance and Feedback. Therefore, we can conclude that if a job is well designed, people feel more comfortable and motivated which results in improved p erformance. Thus, our research hypothesis has proven to be true.TimescaleKey tasks with milestones plotted along a time line