COM502 “HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT” 09/02/20
CHAPTER 4: Analyzing Work and Designing Jobs
WORK FLOW IN ORGANIZATIONS
LO 4-1
Summarize the elements of work flow analysis.
• Informed decisions about jobs take place in the context of the organization’s overall work flow. Through the
process of work flow design, managers analyze the tasks needed to produce a product or service. With this
information, they assign these tasks to specific jobs and positions. Basing these decisions on work flow deign
can lead to better results than the more traditional practice of looking at jobs individually.
job - is a set of related duties.
position - is the set of duties performed by one person.
(Ex. A school has many teaching positions; the person filling each of those positions is performing the job of
teacher.)
WORK FLOW ANALYSIS
Outputs - are the products of any work unit, say, a department or team. Outputs may be tangible, as in the case
of a restaurant meal or finished part. They may be intangible, such as building security or an answered question
about employee benefits. In identifying the outputs of particular work units, work flow analysis considers both
quantity and quality. Thinking in terms of these outputs gives HRM professionals a clearer view of how to
increase each work unit’s effectiveness.
Work Process - used to generate the outputs identified. Work processes are the activities that a work unit’s
members engage in to produce a given output. They are described in terms of operating procedures of every
task performed by each employee at each stage of the process. Specifying the process helps HRM professionals
design efficient work systems by clarifying which tasks are necessary. Knowledge of work processes also can
guide staffing changes when work is automated, outsourced, or restructured.
Inputs - required to carry out the work processes. Inputs fall into three categories:
• raw inputs - materials and information
• equipment - special equipment, facilities and systems
• human resources - knowledge, skills and abilities
(Ex. In an Amazon warehouse, inputs include the items held in inventory to fill orders, a variety of automated
equipment to move and track items, and workers to fill boxes, dispatch robots, and ensure orders are filled
accurately. Automation has taken over tasks such as heavy lifting, memorization of warehouse locations, and
even efficient use of packaging tape, but it has not reduced the quantity of human resources needed in the
warehouse. Rather, the ability to move more products efficiently through each warehouse has contributed to
growing demand for Amazon’s services. Another way to understand the importance of identifying inputs is to
consider what can go wrong.)
WORK FLOW DESIGN AND ORGANIZATION’S STRUCTURE
LO 4-2
Describe how work flow is related to an organization’s structure.
• Although there are infinite number of ways to combine the elements of an organization’s structure, we can
make some general observations about structure and work design. If the structure is strongly based on function,
workers tend to have low authority and to work alone at highly specialized jobs. Jobs that involve teamwork or
broad responsibility tend to require a structure based on divisions other than functions. When the goal is to
empower employees, companies need to set up structures and jobs that enable broad responsibility, such as jobs
that involve employees in serving a particular group of customers or producing a particular product, rather than
performing a narrowly defined function. The organization’s structure also affects managers’ jobs. Managing a
division responsible for a product or customer group tends to require more experience and cognitive (thinking)
ability than managing a department that handles a particular function. In contrast, managing a functional
department requires skill in managing conflicts and aligning employees’ efforts with higher-level goals, because
these employees tend to identify heavily with their department or profession.
JOB ANALYSIS
LO 4-3
Define the elements of a job analysis, and discuss their significance of human resource management.
• To achieve high-quality performance organizations have to understand and match job requirements and
people. This understanding requires:
job analysis - the process of getting detailed information about jobs. Analyzing jobs and understanding what is
required to carry out a job provide essential knowledge for staffing, training, performance appraisal, and many
other HR activities.
job description - is a list of tasks, duties, and responsibilities (TDRs) that job entails. TDRs re observable
actions. (Ex. a news photographer ’s job requires the jobholder to use a camera to take photographs. If you were
to observe someone in that position for a day, you would almost certainly see some pictures being taken.) When
a manager attempts to evaluate job performance, it is important to have detailed information about the work
performed in the job (that is, the TDRs). This information makes it possible to determine how well an individual
is meeting each job requirement.
job specifications - looks at the qualities or requirements the person performing the job must possess. It is a list
of knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics (KSAOs) that an individual must have to perform the
job.
• Knowledge - refers to factual or procedural information that is necessary for successfully performing a task.
(Ex. This course is providing you with knowledge in how to manage human resources.)
• Skill - is an individual’s level of proficiency at performing a particular task — that is, the capability to perform
it well. With knowledge and experience, you could acquire skill in the task of preparing job specifications.
• Ability - in contrast to skills, refers to a more general enduring capability that an individual possesses. A
person might have the ability to cooperate with others or to write clearly and precisely.
SOURCES OF JOB INFORMATION
LO 4-4
Tell how to obtain information for a job analysis.
• A drawback of relying solely on incumbents’ information is that they may have an incentive to exaggerate
what they do in order to appear more valuable to the organization. Information from incumbents should
therefore be supplemented with information from observers, such as supervisors, who look for a match between
what incumbents are doing and what they are supposed to do. Research suggests that supervisors may provide
the most accurate estimates of the importance of job duties, whereas incumbents may be more accurate in
reporting information about the actual time spent performing job tasks and safety-related risk factors.
• The U.S. Department of Labor also provides background information for analyzing jobs. The effort began
with the “Dictionary of Occupational Titles”, first published in the 1930s, and has since been upgraded to an
online database called the Occupational Information Network (O*NET). The O*NET uses a common language
that generalizes across jobs to describe the abilities, work styles, work activities, and work context required for
1,000 broadly defined occupations. users can visit O*NET Resources Center to review jobs’ tasks, work styles
and context, and requirements including skills, training and experience.
POSITION ANALYSIS QUESTIONNAIRE
• After gathering information, the job analyst uses the information to analyze the job. One of the broadest and
best-researched instruments for analyzing jobs is the Position Analysis Questionnaire (PAQ). This is a
standardized job analysis questionnaire containing 194 items that represent work behaviors, work conditions,
and job characteristics that apply to a wide variety of jobs. The questionnaire organizes these items into six
sections concerning different aspects of the job:
1. Information Input - where and how a worker gets information needed to perform the job.
2. Mental Processes - the reasoning, decision making, planning and information-processing activities involved
in performing the job.
3. Work Output - the physical activities, tools and devices used by the worker to perform the job.
4. Relationship with Other Persons - the relationships with other people required in performing the job.
5. Job Context - the physical and social contexts where the work is performed.
6. Other Characteristics - the activities, conditions and characteristics other than those previously described
that are relevant to the job.
Fleishman Job Analysis System - asks subject-matter experts (typically job incumbents) to evaluate a job in
terms of the abilities required to perform the job. The survey is based on 52 categories of abilities, ranging from
written comprehension to deductive reasoning, manual dexterity, stamina, and originality. The person
completing the survey indicates which point on the scale represents the level of the ability requires for
performing the job being analyzed.
ANALYZING TEAMWORK
• Just as there are standardized instruments for assessing the nature of a job, there are standard ways to measure
the nature of teams. Three dimensions are most critical:
1. Skill Differentiation - the degree to which team members have specialized knowledge or functional
capacities.
2. Authority Differentiation - the allocation of decision-making authority among individuals, subgroups and the
team as a whole.
3. Temporal (time) Stability - the length of time over which team members must work together.
IMPORTANCE OF JOB ANALYSIS
- Job analysis is so important to HR managers that it has been called the building block of everything
that personnel does. The fact is that almost every human resource management program requires some type of
information that is gleaned for job analysis.
• Work Redesign - often an organization seeks to redesign work to make it more efficient or to improve quality.
The redesign requires detailed information about the existing job(s). In addition, preparing the redesign is
similar to analyzing a job that does not yet exist.
• Human Resource Planning - as planners analyze human resource needs and how to meet those needs, they
must have accurate information about the levels of skill requires in various jobs, so that they can tell what kinds
of human resources will be needed.
• Selection - to identify the most qualified applicants for various positions, decision makers need to know what
tasks the individuals must perform, as well as necessary knowledge, skills and abilities.
• Training - almost every employee hired by an organization will require training. Any training program
requires knowledge of the tasks performed in a job so that the training is related to the necessary knowledge and
skills.
• Performance Appraisal - an accurate performance appraisal requires information about how well each
employee is performing in order to reward employees who perform well and to improve their performance if it
is below standard. Job analysis helps in identifying the behaviors and the results associated with effective
performance.
• Career Planning - matching an individual’s skills and aspirations with career opportunities requires that those
in charge of career planning know the skill requirements of the various jobs. This allows them to guide
individuals into jobs in which they will succeed and be satisfied.
• Job Evaluation - the process of job evaluation involves assessing the relative dollar value of each job to the
organization in order to set up fair pay structures. If employees do not believe pay structures are fair, they will
become dissatisfied and may quit, or they will not see much benefit in striving for promotions. To put dollar
values on jobs, it is necessary to get information about different jobs and compare them.
COMPETENCY MODELS
LO 4-5
Summarize recent trends in job analysis.
competency - is an area of personal capability that enables employees to perform their work successfully. (Ex.
Success in a job or career path might require leadership strength, skill in coaching others, and the ability to
bring out the best in each member of a diverse team of employees. A competency model identifies and
describes all the competencies required for success in a particular occupation or set of jobs.)
TRENDS IN JOB ANALYSIS
• The pace of change is accelerating because of the widening availability of robotics, artificial intelligence,
voice recognition, and new applications of information technology. These developments let organizations
automate processes once assumed to be the domain of humans. These changes lower costs and improve the
quality of output. Analysts disagree about the impact on the number of jobs but agree that jobs are changing.
One expectation is more jobs where robots and computers augment, rather than replace, workers. The
technology provides information and assistance so employees can do more than the previously could. Job
analysis will therefore need to consider which tasks are best assigned to humans, and which to technology.
JOB DESIGN
LO 4-6
Describe methods for designing a job so that it can be done efficiently.
job design - the process of defining how work will be performed and what tasks will be required in a given job
or job redesign.
job redesign - a similar process that involves changing an existing job design.
• To design jobs effectively, a person must thoroughly understand the job itself (through job analysis) and its
place in the larger work unit’s work flow process (through work flow analysis). Having a detailed knowledge of
the tasks performed in the work unit and the job, a manager then has many alternative ways to design a job.
DESIGNING EFFICIENT JOBS
• if workers perform tasks as efficiently as possible, not only does the organization benefit from lower costs and
greater output per worker, but workers should be less fatigued. This point of view has for years formed the basis
of classical:
industrial engineering - which looks for the simplest way to structure work in order to maximize efficieny.
Typically, applying industrial engineering to a job reduces the complexity of the work, making it so simple that
almost anyone can be trained quickly and easily to perform the job. Such jobs tend to be highly specialized and
repetitive.
DESIGNING JOBS THAT MOTIVATE
LO 4-7
Identify approaches to designing a job to make it motivating.
• A model that shows how to make jobs more motivating is the Job Characteristics Model, developed by
Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham. This model describes jobs in terms of five characteristics.
1. Skill Variety - the extent to which a job requires a variety of skills to carry out the tasks involved.
2. Task Identity - the degree to which a job requires completing a “whole” piece of work from the beginning to
end (Ex. Building an entire component or resolving a customer’s complaint).
3. Task Significance - the extent to which the job has an important impact on the lives of other people.
4. Autonomy - the degree to which the job allows an individual to make decisions about the way the work be
carried out.
5. Feedback - the extent to which a person receives clear information about performance effectiveness from the
work itself.
• As shown in Figure 4.5, the more of each of these characteristics a job has, the more motivating the job will
be, according to the Job Characteristics Model.
job enlargement - refers to broadening the types of tasks performed. The objective of job enlargement is to
make jobs less repetitive and more interesting.
job extension - is enlarging jobs by combining several relatively simple jobs to form a job with a wider range of
tasks.
job rotation - does not actually redesign the jobs themselves, but moves employees among several different
jobs. This approach to job enlargement is common among production teams. During the course of a week, a
team member may carry out each of the jobs handled by the team. Team members might assemble components
one day and pack products into cases another day. As with job extension, the enlarged jobs may still consist of
repetitious activities, but with greater variation among those activities.
job enrichment - or empowering workers by adding more decision-making authority to their jobs, comes from
the work of Frederick Herzberg. According to Herzberg’s two-factor theory, individuals are motivated more by
the intrinsic aspects of work (Ex. the meaningfulness of a job) than by extrinsic rewards, such as pay. Herzberg
identified five factors he associated with motivating jobs:
1. achievement
2. recognition
3. growth
4. responsibility
5. performance of the entire job
• Thus, ways to enrich a manufacturing job might include giving employees authority to stop production when
quality standards are not being met and having each employee perform several tasks to complete a particular
stage of the process, rather than dividing up the tasks among the employees. For a salesperson in a store, job
enrichment might involve the authority to resolve customer problems, including the authority to decide whether
to issue refunds or replace merchandise.
self-managing work teams - instead of merely enriching individual jobs, some organizations empower
employees by designing work to be done by self-managing work teams. These teams have authority for an
entire work process or segment. Team members typically have authority to schedule work, hire team members,
resolve problems related to the team’s performance, and perform other duties traditionally handled by
management. Teamwork can give a job such motivating characteristics as autonomy, skill, variety and task
identity.
flextime - is a scheduling policy in which full-time employees may choose starting and ending times within
guidelines specified by the organization. The flextime policy may require that employees be at work between
certain hours, say, 10:00 am and 3:00 pm. Employees work additional hours before and after this period in order
to work the full day. One employee might arrive early in the morning in order to leave at 3:00 pm to pick up
children after school. Another employee might be a night owl who prefers to arrive at 10:00 am and work until
6:00, 7:00 or even later in the evening.
job sharing - is a work option in which two part0time employees carry out the tasks associated with a single
job. Such arrangements can enable an organization to attract or retain valued employees who want more time to
attend school or to care for family members. The job requirements in such an arrangement include the ability to
work cooperatively and coordinate the details of one’s job with another person.
• Although not strictly a form of flexibility for all individual employees, another scheduling alternative is the
compressed workweek.
compressed workweek - is a schedule in which full-time workers complete their weekly hours in fewer than five
days. (Ex. Instead of working eight hours a day for five days, the employees could complete 40 hours of work
in for 10-hour days.)
telework - flexibility can extend to work locations as well as work schedules. Before the Industrial Revolution,
most people worked either close to or inside their own homes. Mass production technologies changed all this,
separating work like from home life, as people began to travel to centrally located factories and offices. Today,
however skyrocketing prices for office space, combined with drastically reduced prices for mobile computing
devices, have made alternatives possible. The broad term for doing one’s work away from a centrally located
office is telework or telecommunicating.
DESIGNING ERGONOMIC JOBS
LO 4-8
Explain how organizations apply ergonomics to design safe jobs.
• The way people use their bodies when they work — whether toting heavy furniture onto a moving van or
sitting quietly before a computer screen — affects their physical well-being and may affect how well and how
long they can work.
ergonomics - the study of interface between individuals’ physiology and the characteristics of the physical work
environment. The goal of ergonomics is to minimize physical strain on the worker by structuring the physical
work environment around the way the human body works. Ergonomics therefor focuses on outcomes such as
reducing physical fatigue, aches and pains, and health complaints. Ergonomic research includes the context in
which work takes place, such as the lighting, space, and hours worked.
DESIGNING JOBS THAT MEET MENTAL CAPABILITIES AND LIMITATIONS
LO 4-9
Discuss how organizations can plan for the mental demands of a job.
• There are several ways to simplify a job’s mental demands. One is to limit the amount of information and
memorization that the job requires. Organizations can also provide adequate lighting, easy-to-understand gauges
and displays, simple-to-operate equipment, and clear instructions. For project management, teamwork, and
work done by employees in different locations, organizations may provide software that helps with tracking
progress. Often, employees try to simplify some of the mental demands of their own jobs by creating checklists,
charts, or other aids. Finally, every job requires some degree of thinking, remembering, and paying attention, so
far every job, organizations need to evaluate whether their employees can handle the job’s mental demands.
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