The job characteristics model helps make the jobs at your organization more varied, challenging, and motivating. An engaged workforce is happier and more productive but keeping employees happy and engaged is something that HR practitioners and managers struggle with. This is where the job characteristics model comes in. What exactly is this model, and how do you bring the theory into practice at your organization? Show
Contents What is the job characteristics model?In 1975, organizational psychologists Greg R. Oldham and J. Richard Hackman wanted to figure out why employees lost interest in their jobs. So, they studied people and their jobs and came up with a universal model that we still use–more than 40 years later–called the job characteristics model. You can apply this model to any job and then work to make the job more engaging and, therefore, a job that will keep the employee happier and more productive. It consists of five components:
Each one of these components can be adjusted to recalibrate a job, making it more engaging for the employee. What is the purpose of the job characteristics model?Oldham and Hackman were looking to reduce the boredom and monotony that comes from working in a factory setting. Instead of getting better and more productive as time passed, they found that employees were becoming bored and unengaged, and their performance dropped. This model helps turn jobs around. DOWNLOADABLE CHEAT SHEET The Organization Development ProcessCheat SheetWant to add Organizational Development skills to your HR toolkit? Download this concise introduction to OD. Written by HR, for HR. The job characteristics model can help an HR professional evaluate a job and make it better and more engaging. Managers can work with their employees to create a better situation for everyone–ultimately increasing engagement and productivity. Sometimes jobs just “happen.” There is a lot of work to be done, so companies hire a new person but fail to conduct a job evaluation and create a position. Using Hackman and Oldham’s job characteristics model, you can sit down and design a job to be more effective. Here are some of the ways that the job characteristics model can help organizations: It helps in creating job design strategies.Unless your business consists of one solo practitioner, you have multiple people in multiple roles. Tasks assigned to each job can vary from position to position. With the job characteristics model, you look at all the functions and build various jobs around them. For instance, you can bring in job rotation, which allows a bit of variety in everyone’s day. Or, you can work to simplify some tasks–especially ones that are tedious. You’ll have some areas you will want to expand and make more critical, and you’ll figure out where you need to include employee enrichment. The job characteristics model recognizes that it’s not just about working today, but developing jobs for the future, so employee enrichment is a critical part of this model. It improves job satisfaction.When Human Resources and management work together with the job characteristics model, they design each job to increase job satisfaction. While it’s impossible to do away with all boring or monotonous tasks, this model can reduce those problems. For example, your busy law firm may have enough work for one person to spend all day filing–a tedious and boring job. You might break that task up so that four people spend two hours per day filing and the other six doing more exciting tasks. The result is higher job satisfaction and better performance. It enables job enrichment.This step focuses on taking a regular job and adding additional tasks and assignments to make it a better job. Instead of focusing on making things as easy as possible, job enrichment makes it more motivating. Job enrichment can give purpose to the job. While the job characteristics model comes from the 1970s, it is still very timely. Younger workers place a high value on meaningful work, and job enrichment can do just that. Better delegation of tasks.The job characteristics model uses job design to make jobs better. Jobs are broken down into specific tasks, and employees receive authority to carry those tasks out. This autonomy gives employees more control over their work environment and increases their job satisfaction. Map out yourHR Career PathDetermine the direction in which you want to progress based on your HR career goals and capabilities. Try our new tool. Get StartedClear organizational information.When everyone’s job description is a result of thorough job analysis with clear tasks and responsibilities, it is easier to manage the organization. You can see who is responsible for which duties. It can make general organizational design easier. It allows for straightforward performance appraisals and goal setting.Because each job is designed rather than thrown together, setting goals and evaluating employee performance becomes more manageable in an organization that follows the job characteristics model. Five core job characteristics in the job characteristics modelThe five core job characteristics identified in Oldman and Hackman’s job characteristics theory and model are: Skill varietyThis is the amount of variety in any one job. A grocery store cashier may have a job with little variety–they scan groceries and deals with customer inquiries all day. The store manager, on the other hand, need to apply a variety of skills to carry out their daily tasks. They may handle customer complaints, create employee schedules, order product, train new managers, and numerous other tasks.Task identityIs there a beginning, middle, and end to a task? Can an employee tell where one task ends and another begins? Project-based jobs have high levels of task identity. How much of one task does any individual employee accomplish? For instance, if a designer designs an entire room, that has a higher task identity than just designing the window treatments.Task significanceWhat type of impact does this task have on the entire company or the customers? Jobs with higher task impact tend to have a broader reach. For example, a chief marketing officer’s work affects the whole company and has high task significance. AutonomyHow much independence does this job have? Does a manager oversee every tiny thing, or is the employee trusted to accomplish the task? Higher task autonomy brings a feeling of ownership and responsibility. Lower levels of autonomy lead to feeling micromanaged and stifled.FeedbackHow much does an employee know about their own performance? Feedback can come from traditional channels, such as manager feedback and customer satisfaction surveys. Or, feedback can come as a natural result of the work. If a janitor’s job is to clean the bathrooms, they can take a look at the bathroom and see how effective they are at their job. On the other hand, someone who works on a manufacturing line may not know how effective they were at their job until the quality assurance people step in and check the work.Let’s have a look at how these core job characteristics translate into actual jobs: Primary school teacher
Fast food worker
HR Generalist
Psychological states and work outcomesThe original development of the job characteristics model searched for how to make jobs better so that employees can be happier and more productive at work. This model can help by affecting the employees’ psychological states. These include:
The updated model defines the following work outcomes:
Bringing theory into practiceIt’s easy to read about these practices, but it may feel overwhelming to remodel the entire company based on this model. You do not need to do everything at once–you can start with one job at a time. For the primary school teacher, you can increase task identity by dividing the work among several teachers. By having one teacher teach all the second-grade students math while another tackles physical education, they can improve their identity, gain better feedback, and increase the autonomy (as far as their specific subject is concerned). For a fast-food worker, you can increase variety by having employees learn each station and rotate through. So, someone may run a cash register on Monday, make sandwiches on Tuesday, and be in charge of the drive-through on Wednesday. This helps keep the job interesting. The HR generalist can have an enriched job when management trusts them to decide how to approach their job. This increased autonomy will increase identity well. For instance, by pulling the job characteristics model examples above, you can see how to maximize the model. There are many different ways to enrich a job. Ask yourself the following questions:
ConclusionThe job characteristics model is a practical tool to analyze your organization’s jobs, which helps you improve your jobs, ultimately leading to increased motivation, satisfaction, and performance. If you want to future-proof your HR skill set and develop new HR competencies, check out our All You Can Learn Certification Program! How many core job dimensions are there?The five core job dimensions identified are autonomy, feedback, skill variety, task identity, and task significance.
What are the 5 core job characteristics?The five core characteristics of job design are skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and job feedback. Including these characteristics in your jobs affects the following work-related outcomes — motivation, satisfaction, performance, absenteeism, and turnover.
How many are key job characteristics?The job characteristics model (JCM) is a theory involving five core job characteristics that are key for employees to excel at their jobs.
What are the various dimensions of the job characteristics model?The first three dimensions are: (a) skill variety (the range of tasks performed), (b) task identity (the ability to complete the whole job from start to finish), and (c) task significance (the impact of the job on others).
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