Job Enrichment

By:
Matías López
 Introducción
• Job enrichment in organizational development, human resources management, and
organizational behavior, is the process of giving the employee a wider and higher
level scope of responsibilitiy with increased decision making authority. This is the
opposite of job enlargement, which simply would not involve greater authority.
Instead, it will only have an increased number of duties
• The terminology used to refer to job enlargement is perhaps in the non-scientific
management of personnel labeled "multi-tasking". This perhaps is a violation of one
of the key principles of human achievement, namely, concentration of effort. One can
perhaps manage and work on a vareity of projects and still practice concentrated
effort , but multitasking as it is in the present used is so out of hand that it often
prevents an employee from getting done with any thing. Unrully multi-tasking may be
a less effective type of job enlargement.
 Herzberg’s Theory
• The current practice of job enrichment stemmed from the work of Frederick
Herzberg in the 1950s and 1960s. Herzberg's two factor theory argued that
job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction are not to be seen as one dimension,
but two. Aspects of work that contributed to job satisfaction are called
motivators and aspects that contributed to job dissatisfaction are called
hygiene factors; hence, the theory is also refereed to as motivator-hygiene
theory. Examples of motivators are recognition, achievement, and
advancement. Examples of hygiene factors are salary, company policies
and working conditions. According to Herzberg's theory, the existance
motivators would lead to job satisfaction, but the lack of motivators would
not lead to job dissatisfaction, and similarly; hygiene factors affect job
dissatisfaction, but not job satisfaction. In general, research has failed to
confirm these central aspects of the theory.
 Techniques

Job enrichment, as a managerial activity includes a

three steps technique:

3. Turn employees' effort into performance

4. Link employees performance directly to reward
5. Make sure the employee wants the reward. How to
find out?
 1. Turn employee's effort into
performance
• Ensuring that objectives are well-defined and understood by everyone. The overall
corporate mission statement should be communicated to all. Individual's goals should
also be clear. Each employee should know exactly how she fits into the overall
process and be aware of how important her contributions are to the organization and
its customers.
• Providing adequate resources for each employee to perform well. This includes
support functions like information technology, communication technology, and
personnel training and development.
• Creating a supportive corporate culture. This includes peer support networks,
supportive management, and removing elements that foster mistrust and politicking.
• Free flow of information. Eliminate secrecy.
• Provide enough freedom to facilitate job excellence. Encourage and reward employee
initiative. Flextime or compressed hours could be offered.
• Provide adequate recognition, appreciation, and other motivators.
• Provide skill improvement opportunities. This could include paid education at
universities or on the job training.
• Provide job variety. This can be done by job sharing or job rotation programmes.
• It may be necessary to re-engineer the job process. This could involve redesigning
the physical facility, redesign processes, change technologies, simplification of
procedures, elimination of repetitiveness, redesigning authority structures.
 2. Link employees performance
directly to reward
• Clear definition of the reward is a must
• Explanation of the link between performance and reward is important
• Make sure the employee gets the right reward if performs well
• If reward is not given, explanation is needed
 3. Make sure the employee wants
the reward. How to find out?
• Ask them

• Use surveys( checklist, listing, questions)

 Conclusion
• Job Enrichment is the addition to a job of tasks that increase the
amount of employee control or responsibility. It is a vertical
expansion of the job as opposed to the horizontal expansion of a
job, which is called job enlargement.