BPMN 2023 2014

Introduction
Job enrichment can be described as a medium through which management can motivate
self-driven employees by assigning them additional responsibility normally reserved for
higher level employees. By doing this, the employees feel like their work has meaning and is
important to the company. This theory is based on the premise that employees have a
natural tendency to want to succeed and are eager to be trusted with a bigger role in the
company. When these types of workers aren't being challenged, they tend to slack off and
not give their best effort because they view their task to be below their skill set. Conversely
when you give employee autonomy over his/her work, they tend to feel responsible for the
outcome of the project and will try to put forward the best end result possible. Overall Job
Enrichment is essential to the workplace because it helps prevent feelings of repetitiveness
in the day to day operations from hindering productivity.
The Origin
The origin concept of Job Enrichment was created by Frederick Herzberg, an American
psychologist. He came up with this term while he was working on his "two factor theory"
which states that both satisfaction and dissatisfaction are driven by separate factors that
are completely independent of each other. To this effect he implies that just because an
individual experiences a decrease in dissatisfaction, does not mean that the result is also an
increase in satisfaction.

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Describe the core characteristics model of job enrichment.
According to the core characteristics model of job enrichment, Hackman and Oldham
identified five factors of job design that typically contribute to people's enjoyment of a job
and an enriched job will be high on the following core job characteristics :
1. Skill Variety
The degree to which a job requires various activities, requiring the worker to develop a
variety of skills and talents. Jobholders can experience more meaningfulness in jobs
that require several different skills and abilities than when the jobs are elementary and
routine.
2. Task Identity
The degree to which the job requires the jobholders to identify and complete a
workpiece with a visible outcome. Workers experience more meaningfulness in a job
when they are involved in the entire process rather than just being responsible for a
part of the work.
3. Task Significance
The degree to which the job impacts other peoples life. The influence can be either in
the immediate organization or in the external environment. Employees feel more
meaningfulness in a job that substantially improves either psychological or physical
well-being of others than a job that has limited impact on anyone else.

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4. Autonomy
The degree to which the job provides the employee with significant freedom,
independence, and discretion to plan out the work and determine the procedures in the
job. For jobs with a high level of autonomy, the outcomes of the work depend on the
workers own efforts, initiatives, and decisions; rather than on the instructions from a
manager or a manual of job procedures. In such cases, the jobholders experience
greater personal responsibility for their own successes and failures at work.
5. Feedback
The degree to which the worker is provided with clear, specific, detailed, actionable
information about the effectiveness of his or her job performance. When workers
receive clear, actionable information about their work performance, they have better
overall knowledge of the impact of their work activities, and what specific actions they
need to take (if any) to improve their productivity.
The core job characteristics directly impact three critical psychological states. Skill variety,
task identity, and task significance affect experienced meaningfulness of work; autonomy
influences experienced responsibility for the outcomes of the work; and feedback affects
knowledge of actual results of work activities. The critical psychological states, in turn,
influence the following job outcomes: high internal work motivation, high growth
satisfaction, high general job satisfaction, and high work effectiveness. The core job
characteristics will not affect everyone in the same way. Employees who have high growthneed strength and the requisite knowledge and skills, and are satisfied with the work
context will respond more favorably to enrich jobs.

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Explain how this model can provide guidance to practicing managers.
1. Form natural work units.
This gives employees ownership of the work and improves the chances they will view it
as meaningful and important rather than as irrelevant and boring. Managers make
sure that the tasks people perform are logically related to one another and provide a
clear and meaningful task identity
2. Combine tasks/Jobs.
Managers can expand job responsibilities by pulling together into one larger job a
number of smaller tasks previously done by others. Besides that, managers can do this
by putting jobs together increases task identity and require the each of the employee to
use a greater variety of skills in performing the job, increasing the meaningfulness of
the work.
3. Establish relationships with clients.
Direct relationships between workers and clients creates additional opportunities for
feedback, increases the need to develop and exercise interpersonal skills, increases
autonomy by giving individuals personal responsibility for deciding how to manage
their relationships with people who receive the outputs of their work.By putting people
in contact with others who, as clients inside and/or outside the organization, use the
results of their work.
4

Practice vertical loading.

The intent here is to partially close the gap between 'doing' and 'managing.' When a job is
vertically loaded, responsibilities and controls formerly reserve for management are given
to employees as part of the job. Example s include
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a. Responsibility for deciding on work methods and advising or training less experienced
workers,
b. Providing increased freedom in time management, including decisions on when to start and
stop work, when to take a break, how to assign work priorities.
c. Encouraging workers to do their own trouble-shooting and to manage their work crises
themselves
d. Providing workers with increased knowledge of the financial aspects of the job and
organization and giving them increased control over budgetary matters that affect their
own work.

In other word we can say that vertical loading is give people more control over their work
by increasing their authority for planning and controlling activities previously done by
supervisors

5 Opening feedback channels.

It usually is advantageous for workers to learn about their performance directly as they do
their job rather than from management on an occasional basis. This is telling us that
provide opportunities for people to receive performance feedback as they work and to
learn how performance changes over time.
We have learnt what are the definition and core characteristics of job enrichment. Now, let
us take a look at should everyones job be enriched or not and why a management should
implement job enrichment and why not. As we all know, job enrichment is a common
motivational technique used by organizations to give an employee greater satisfaction in
their work.
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Thus, there are many reasons why an organization must implement job enrichment in their
daily operation while at the same time there are reasons why it is better not to enrich their
jobs.
Why everyones job must be enriched?
Now let us discuss about the advantages of job enrichment in organization that is why
everyones job should be enriched. The advantages of job enrichment can be divided into
two major categories. They are benefits to the company and also benefits to the employee.
Firstly, the employees tend to learn new skills. When an employee's level of responsibility
increases, and they gets the opportunity to try new tasks, it's inevitable that she will learn
new skills.
Secondly, everyones job needs to be enriched because it can help the employee to reduce
boredom. This is because employees get bored with the mundane day-to-day tasks they
have to complete. Job enrichment adds variety to employees' duties, which can reduce their
workplace boredom. Along with reducing boredom, job enrichment challenges employees
to stretch their skills beyond what they are used to doing at the company.
Thirdly, it can also help an employee in receiving recognition. Job enrichment also gives
the employee a chance to test and recognize their strengths and weaknesses. An employee
who excels with a great depth of task may gain recognition, which can lead to company
awards and incentives, or even a promotion within the company.
Lastly, an organization should enrich their jobs in order to increase the employees
motivation level. Employees are more mentally stimulated when they take on authoritative,
or any decision-making roles. This keeps them mentally focused on their tasks and the

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objectives of the company besides, increasing the organizations productivity level and at
the same time reducing absenteeism.
In term of the organization, there are few benefits as well in implementing job enrichment.
The companies turn to job enrichment as a way of boosting the organizational morale. The
more valuable each employee feels, the more motivated they are to produce top results.
Not only that, the companies also can operate more efficiently when employees bear
significant responsibility for their work and results.
In some cases, using enrichment can minimize layers of management. Plus, with job
enrichment, employees learn more vertical skills that equip them for a higher level
position.
Why everyones job must not be enriched?
There are few reasons why an organization should not implement job enrichment. As we
all know, the main disadvantage of job enrichment are poor performance due to lack of
training.
This is because, when employees are given a greater depth of tasks through job enrichment,
they may not be skilled or experienced in the new tasks they are asked to perform due to
lack of training, lack of interest or lack of clarity about their new tasks. These will
eventually lead to decrease in productivity.
Then, a primary disadvantage of job enrichment is an increase in an employee's workload.
While some employees may be able to immediately re-prioritize their time and tasks, some
may initially experience difficulties getting adjusted with their new responsibilities. The

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increase in work can cause employees to get frustrated, burned out, increase in their
absenteeism and lower their overall productivity.
Lastly, why an organization should not use job enrichment is because it can cause conflict
with non-participants. Every employee at an organization may not be eligible to participate
in job enrichment. Those individuals who want more responsibility, but haven't shown that
they can handle it, may become disgruntled, bitter toward management and the employees
who are a part of the job enrichment process.
Thus, to avoid all these negative consequences, an organization should not implement job
enrichment.
Overall, there is an ample of importance in applying job enrichment in an organization
besides few minor disadvantages. So, it is advisable for an organization to apply job
enrichment in their daily activity in order to increase their effectiveness and efficiency.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, organizations are increasingly facing the heat of attrition, which is not good
to the organization. Lots of time, money and resources are also spent into training an
individual for a particular job. As we discussed earlier, job enrichment is a management
concept that involves redesigning jobs so that they are more challenging to the employee
and have less repetitive work. Thus, it is vital for a company to apply job enrichment in
their organization in order to minimize their cost of training and to increase the employees
motivation and productivity besides creating a positive organization behavior among them.