LO3

• Job design


  • process of assigning tasks to a job, including

  the interdependency of those tasks with other jobs

  • tries to balance these potentially competing effects of efficiency and motivation.
• Organization's goal


  design jobs that can be performed efficiently yet employees are motivated and satisfied with work.​
• Supermarket cashiers perform jobs with a high degree of job specialization.
• job specialization 


  The result of division of labour in which work is subdivided into separate jobs assigned to different

  people.
• Cycle time


  time required to complete the task before starting

  over with another item or client
• Why would companies divide work into such tiny bits?

  job specialization potentially improves work efficiency.
• four ways job specialization potentially improves work efficiency

  1. Fewer skills and less knowledge to learn
  2. More frequent practice.
  3. Less attention residue from changing tasks.
  4. Better person–job matching.
• Fewer skills and less knowledge to learn.


  Employees can master specialized jobs more quickly because there are fewer physical and mental skills and knowledge to learn and

  therefore less time required to become proficient in the job.
• More frequent practice.


  More specialized jobs typically have shorter cycle times. Shorter task cycles give employees more frequent practice with the task, so jobs are mastered more quickly.
• Less attention residue from changing tasks

  Employees experiencethis after they change from one type of task to another.
• Better person–job matching.


  Job specialization tends to increase work efficiency by enabling employers to more precisely match employees with specific aptitudes, skills,knowledge, interests, and other characteristics to the jobs

  for which these talents are best suited
• The benefits of job specialization were noted more than 2,300 years ago by the Chinese philosopher Mencius and the Greek philosopher Plato.
• Scottish economist Adam Smith wrote 250 years ago about the advantages of job specialization
• Smith described a small factory where 10 pin makers collectively produced as many as 48,000 pins per day because they performed specialized tasks.
• Scientific management


  The practice of systematically partitioning work into its smallest elements and standardizing tasks to achieve maximum efficiency.
• Frederick Winslow Taylor


  One of the strongest advocates of job specialization
• Frederick Winslow Taylor


  an American industrial engineer who introduced the principles of scientific management in the early 1900s.
• Frederick Winslow Taylor 


  championed specialization and standardization.
• employees in specialized jobs tend to produce higher quality output because, as we mentioned earlier, they master their work faster compared to

  people in jobs with a wide variety of tasks.
• job specialization also has two negative effects

  on work quality. 


  • First, many jobs (such as supermarket cashiers) are specialized to the point that they are highly

  repetitive and tedious.

  • Second, by performing a tiny piece of the

  overall product or service, employees in specialized jobs

  have difficulty striving for better quality or even noticing

  flaws with the work unit’s overall output
• Frederick Winslow Taylor and his contemporaries 


  focusedon how job specialization reduces labour “waste” by improving the mechanical efficiency of work (i.e., matching skills, faster learning, less switchover time).