Pearls are always classic.
I was a teaching machine for 11 years at LSU – teaching Human Resource Management, Employee Selection & Placement, Human Behavior in Organizations, and Principles of Management. Something I learned is that when a particular concept shows up repeatedly in textbooks, especially textbooks for different courses, it’s worth knowing.
One classic in particular that was in most every management text I ever used is Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Model. It is a model of how specific, important job characteristics affect work outcomes and psychological states. For years it has been presented as a way to analyze and understand job satisfaction and guide job design. In today’s lingo, I think it is relevant to employee engagement. In the research literature, there are differences between satisfaction, commitment, and engagement but I still believe it’s worth considering.
Three job characteristics – skill variety, task identity and task significance – affect the meaningfulness of the work. Skill variety refers to the variety of skills the job requires. Task identity has to do with the extent to which the work accomplishes a whole, identifiable unit; task significance is the importance of the work to other people. Another characteristic, autonomy, represents the amount of personal responsibility the worker experiences. Feedback, the final job characteristic, concerns how much information the worker gets about how effectively they have performed. All five of the characteristics together impact motivation, performance and satisfaction.
At the risk of oversimplifying, the idea is that incorporating these characteristics improves the job for the worker.
Gallup recently reported research that found only three in ten American workers are engaged. It is hard to believe that a whopping 70% of the US workforce is not engaged. As managers, supervisors, and HR search for ways to make their organizations and jobs more engaging, I recommend throwing the Job Characteristics Model into the toolbox. It’s a classic and its concepts (i.e., incorporating the job characteristics into jobs) may yield positive results.
Just want to add that empirical research has found some support for the validity of the Job Characteristics Model.
Your thoughts on this one?