Job enrichment is an
approach to job design that directly applies job characteristics theory to make
jobs more interesting and to improve employee motivation. Job enrichment puts specialized tasks back together so that one
person is responsible for producing a whole product or an entire service.
Job enrichment expands
both the horizontal and the vertical dimensions of a job. Instead of people working
on an assembly line at one or more stations, the entire assembly line process is
abandoned to enable each worker to assemble an entire product, such as a
kitchen appliance or radio.
For example, at
Motorola’s Communications Division, individual employees are now responsible
for assembling, testing, and packaging the company’s pocket radio-paging devices.
Previously, these products were made on an assembly line that broke the work
down into 100 different steps and used as many workers.
Job enrichment gives
employees more opportunities for autonomy and feedback. It also gives them more
responsibilities that require decision making, such as scheduling work,
determining work methods, and judging quality. However, the successful
implementation of job enrichment is limited by the production technology
available and the capabilities of the employees who produce the product or
service. Some products are highly complex and require too many steps for one individual to produce them
efficiently. Other products require the application of so many different skills
that it is not feasible to train employees in all of them. For example, it
could take an employee a lifetime to master all the skills necessary to
assemble a Boeing 777 aircraft.
Job enrichment can
provide opportunities for increased interactions with customers and others who
are affected by the results of the work. A job design that has provisions for
contact with customers is likely to increase the meaningfulness of an
employee’s work when he or she learns in the customer’s own voice how the
customer uses the product and how it affects him or her. For example, putting
software engineers in contact with groups of customers on a frequent basis to
see how they use the software can motivate the software engineers to create a
future version of the software that is easier to use and that has more
applications that customers want.