How a manager can motivate employees performance through job design and goal settings explain with examples?

Answer 1

Motivating the employees has always been a very crucial point for the managers and administrators. Researches show that the more relevant experience the job holders have, the better job they tend to do. In other words, if a person has some experience and background in any task or job he/ she will do better in that field. So, workers should be employed on the basis of their knowledge and past experience about any job. For example, a person who has a background in finance should always be given works related to finance and accounting calculations and a person who has studied or has experience in management should always be hired in the management department. In this way, they will have a much better performance and output. But some researchers also assert that there is a body of knowledge supporting the idea that certain job designs and goal setting can enhance performance.

JOB DESIGN:

Job design has emerged as a very new technique and idea used to motivate workers in the field of organizational behavior. In the recent years much work and progress is made in the job designing and a lot of theories have been presented for job designing to better motivate the workers. Initially, the field of organizational behavior paid attention only to job enrichment approaches to job design. But now the new approaches like job engineering, job enrichment, job enlargement, and job rotation have broadened the perspective of job design. Some of these techniques or approaches are stated below.

JOB ENGINEERING:

Frederick W. Taylor was a leading scientific manager and he suggested that job design may be the most important element in better management. He studied how to increase the efficiency of humans in jobs. So, the scientific management approach was evolved into what is now called the job engineering. This job engineering approach is concerned with product, process, and tool design; plant layout; standard operating procedures; work measurement and standards; work methods; and human-machine interactions. So, keeping this approach in mind different systems were designed to make the workers more efficient and hard working. For example, sophisticated computer applications involving Artificial Intelligence (AI), expert systems and soft wares and computer-assisted design (CAD) were designed to increase the working power and efficiency of workers. So, with the introduction of these systems the jobs became much more specialized (the employee did one or a very few tasks) and standardized (the employee did the task the same way every time).

For example, a person working in a factory used to do the same job each time and every day. Same was the case with the offices and banks; a person used to do only one job and their works was brief and specialized. This approach was very successful at first and the results were very productive and satisfactory. Though these specialized and standardized jobs were practiced till 1960s and employers had a better control over the jobs and it was cost saving but still some problems were arising out of this system and side effects like boredom, quality of work, absenteeism and turnover were ignored.

JOB ENLARGEMENT:

Job enlargement is another approach to Job Design. It is horizontally loading the job. Or it is the method in which the number of tasks to be performed by a person is expanded and hence made less specialized. Job enlargements make workers more hard working and they get knowledge of different tasks performed in an organization.

For example, the work of a person working in finance department can be enlarged as he has to do some of the tasks of management department.