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Job Enrichment: By: Sifikhile S.Moyo

Job enrichment is a process that motivates employees by adding responsibilities and decision-making authority to existing jobs. It aims to make jobs more meaningful. The main benefit is increased motivation, especially for skilled white-collar jobs. Job enrichment adds dimensions like responsibility and feedback to psychological states and leads to outcomes like better performance and lower turnover. While it may increase intensity, studies found it reduces frustration and increases loyalty, involvement, and motivation rather than decreasing satisfaction. Common applications include combining tasks, quality circles, and autonomy.

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32 views7 pages

Job Enrichment: By: Sifikhile S.Moyo

Job enrichment is a process that motivates employees by adding responsibilities and decision-making authority to existing jobs. It aims to make jobs more meaningful. The main benefit is increased motivation, especially for skilled white-collar jobs. Job enrichment adds dimensions like responsibility and feedback to psychological states and leads to outcomes like better performance and lower turnover. While it may increase intensity, studies found it reduces frustration and increases loyalty, involvement, and motivation rather than decreasing satisfaction. Common applications include combining tasks, quality circles, and autonomy.

Uploaded by

Buddha 2.O
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Job Enrichment

By: Sifikhile S.Moyo


What is Job Enrichment
• The process often involves a reduction of direct supervision asworkers take
more responsibility for their own work and are allowed some degree of
decision making authority.
• Job enrichment is a process that is characterized by adding dimensions to
existing jobs to make them more motivating.
• The goal of job enrichment is to create a motivating job. This can be done, for
example, by taking a regular, ‘boring’ job and adding extra responsibilities
that make the job more meaningful for the worker. Job enrichment is,
therefore, part of job design and job redesign.
Why choose Job Enrichment
• The biggest reason to invest in job enrichment is that it leads to motivation. This
makes job enrichment especially relevant for highly skilled, white-collar service
jobs. According to Fein (1986), job enrichment is less important for blue-collar
workers. Here their primary concern is pay, job security, and the rules of the
workplace. Job enrichment is less effective in this context because it does not
address these problems.
• To conclude with a job enrichment definition: Job enrichment is the process of
adding motivators to existing roles in order to increase satisfaction and
productivity for the employee.
Advantages of job enrichment
• The results of job enrichment can be categorized in psychological states
and personal and work outcomes. Examples of psychological states are
meaningfulness, responsibility for the outcomes of the work, and
knowledge of the actual results and impact of the work. Examples of work
outcomes are motivation, high-quality work performance, higher work
satisfaction, better employee experience, and lower absence and employee
turnover
Benefits cntd
• One could imagine that job enrichment could also lead to decreased satisfaction due to the increasing
intensity and scope of the work. This has not been found in the literature. Rather, the increasing
intensity and scope are experienced as a motivational variable. The exception is workers with low
growth needs or with low knowledge and skills. For these workers, job enrichment was more likely to
produce frustration than satisfaction (Cummings & Worley, 2009).
• Other advantages include that people experience their jobs as being more enriched, show higher job
involvement, internal motivation, and increased loyalty. A study by Niehoff and colleagues (2001)
showed that job enrichment led to higher loyalty in the high-stress environment of a downsizing
company. In this situation, job enrichment was successfully used as a way to retain people.
• Interestingly, job enrichment does not necessarily lead to greater productivity. Although employees
experience the work as more meaningful, they don’t necessarily generate more output.
Application’s

• 1. Creating natural work units. The formation of natural work units is about grouping interrelated tasks together. This
creates ownership of the tasks and allows the employee to see the result of their work, leading to an increase in
ownership, task identity, and perceived task significance.
• 2. Combining tasks. Divided jobs can be put together to create broader, more rewarding jobs. Cummings & Worley
mention Corning Glass Works, a laboratory hotplate assembling plant. Separate tasks were combined so that each operator
would completely assemble, inspect, and ship a hotplate. This meant that each assembler could identify with a finished
product and self-inspect it, leading to greater task significance, autonomy, and feedback. This resulted in an increase in
productivity of 84%, a drop of controllable rejects from 23 to less than 1%, and absenteeism dropped from 8 to less than
1%.
• 3. Quality circles. Quality circles, or Kaizen groups, are groups of employees who regularly meet to consider ways of
resolving problems and improving productivity in their organization. These small groups increase participatory
management and lead to more task identity and autonomy.
Application Cntd
• 5. Feedback. The simple act of giving regular feedback may be the easiest
job enrichment intervention of them all. Feedback, whether it comes from
one’s direct manager or peers through a 360-degree feedback assessment,
helps the employee to grow and develop and is a key way to enrich one’s
job.
• 6. Autonomy. Autonomy is another key part of the motivating potential of
a job. Any intervention that can increase autonomy will lead to an increase
in motivating potential. Examples include being able to determine when
one takes a break or being made responsible for a project or process.

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