by
Charles Lamson
Job Enrichment and Enlargement
Three of the most influential advocates of this approach to motivation and control were Abraham Maslow, Frederick Herzberg, and Chris Argyris. Maslow's model of human motivation is widely known: people have five kinds of needs that are arranged in a hierarchy: physiological (expressed in feelings of thirst, lust and so on), safety (feeling free from danger, harm, and the fear that physiological needs will not be met), belongingness (a desire for meaningful relationships with other people), esteem or ego (feelings of accomplishment and recognition), and self-actualization (a concept that Maslow never explained clearly but that seems to be related to the feeling that one has done or is doing what one is meant to do). Once lower-level needs are fulfilled, upper-level needs become salient. Herzberg refined Maslow's model by differentiating lower-level needs (which he called hygeine factors) and higher level needs (which he called motivators). Hygiene factors motivate people by allowing them to avoid pain. When these needs are not met, people feel discomfort; when they are met, the discomfort is reduced, but once an adequate level of fulfillment is reached, no additional pleasure is felt. Motivators create pleasure when they are provided, but their absence does not cause frustration or pain. Although neither Maslow's nor Herzberg's conclusions have been supported consistently by subsequent research, their perspective became the basis of a number of strategies for increasing workers' job satisfaction by enlarging and enriching their jobs.
One of the earliest and most influential advocates of job enrichment/enlargement was Chris Argyris. He argued that many of the key characteristics of traditional models of organizing frustrated the needs of normal, psychologically healthy people. Jobs that are specialized or routinized (performed in the same way day after day), supervisors who control their employees "tightly" and highly competitive, individualistic atmospheres are especially frustrating. People respond to these situations by acting in ways that are counterproductive for their organizations - becoming defensive (attacking or withdrawing from coworkers) or apathetic (for example, daydreaming), socializing with other frustrated workers instead of focusing attention on their work, leaving the organization, or attempting to advance to positions that are less frustrating. The traditional strategy focuses on creating precisely these kinds of situations by acting in ways that are counterproductive for their organizations. Managers are charged with de-skilling jobs - segmenting, simplifying, and routinizing them - making them "impoverished and small" as possible.
Presumably, this de-skilling of jobs is designed to increase organizational efficiency. It is so alienating for employees that it often leads to a net loss in individual and organizational productivity. the real reason de-skilling often is used is to enhance supervisory control, rather than to improve efficiency. Direct surveillance is easiest when jobs are de-skilled. In addition, organizations with many de-skilled jobs can hire employees who have few alternatives, and thus cannot resist management, regardless of how alienated they are - high school people, disabled or most recently, residents of third world countries, including children perform de-skilled tasks that can easily be outsourced (contracted to outside organizations who use their own workers to do the job, often at much lower rates of pay), or assigned to part time, or other contingent workers (people who are hired for a specific project only). and because workers perform tasks requiring few skills, they are easy to replace when they are fired. Arraying de-skilled tasks along an assembly line provides workers with little or no opportunity to communicate with one another, and forces them to adjust the pace of their activities to the pace of the machines. This keeps them from sharing grievances, comparing the way management treats them, or making plans for collective action.
New technology can be developed solely for the purpose of simplifying and routinizing jobs even further. For example, at one time the service jobs of grocery store checker and fast-food sales clerk required at least minimal arithmetical, keyboarding, and memory skills. Today, computerized cash registers, like all other de-skilling technologies, can increase output per person hour - make it possible to hire people without these skills. The next time you visit your local McDonald's, look closely at the keyboard on the cash registers and ask yourself what skills are necessary to operate it. To see just how de-skilled these jobs are, order something that is not represented by a button on the keyboard and see what happens. By the mid-1960s, most production workers in the United States were involved in this kind of routine, repetitive, de-skilled activity, which failed to fulfill individual needs for creativity, autonomy, or sociability. By the mid-1980s, many white collar workers were involved in similar jobs.
Although de-skilling does increase productivity for a time, it also decreases job satisfaction and encourages resistance. Sometimes resistance is informal. For example, sales clerks have long resisted de-skilling by creating and using their own informal relational strategies. They are friendly and supportive of one another, huddle together on the floor to foster in-group communication, ignore management's efforts to make them compete against one another, share duties that management assigns to individuals, and meet together outside of work to engage in "rituals of women's culture," such as wedding and baby showers. Other forms of resistance involve more overt hostility between labor and management.
An alternative to de-skilling is for management to do just the opposite, to enlarge or enrich jobs. Doing so increases productivity, because it allows organizations to decentralize. It also increases profitability, by substituting the upper level rewards of enhanced creativity and autonomy, for expensive lower-level awards, such as salaries and wages. But, successful enlargement/enrichment relies heavily on relational communication. If a job is too complex, it is frustrating and unsatisfying. If it is too simple, it is boring. Successfully matching workers and jobs, as Frederick Taylor realized a century ago, requires a high level of open communication and feedback between supervisors and their subordinates. In addition, workers seem to figure out how rich their jobs are, both by monitoring what they do and by talking with other workers. Unless people believe that their tasks are stimulating, they will not be stimulated. Workers develop these beliefs when other workers tell them that they envy their jobs. In fact, job satisfaction in general is influenced by both the objective features of employees' jobs, and by what their co-workers say about their jobs thus successful. job enlargement/enrichment requires both careful job-design and active, and supportive relational communication.
*SOURCE: STRATEGIC ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY 9TH EDITION BY CHARLES CONRAD AND MARSHALL SCOTT POOLE; PGS. 125-127*
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