DISCUSSION BOARD GENERAL DIRECTIONS: Very short or brief responses are not accep

DISCUSSION BOARD GENERAL DIRECTIONS:
Very short or brief responses are not acceptable. Comply with the 500-word minimum word count. There are no discernible benefits to brevity when writing at the college level. Format of your discussion board post in accordance with APA requirements. Insert parenthetical citations at the point at which you use materials from your resources to avoid plagiarism. APA format is author/year as in (Stevenson, 2021) for paraphrased citations, or (Stevenson, 2021, p. 123) for a direct quote from a specific page.
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HERE IS THE PRIMARY RESOURCE:
Job design involves specifying the content and methods of jobs. Job designers focus on what will be done in a job, who will do the job, how the job will be done, and where the job will be done. The objectives of job design include productivity, safety, and quality of work life.
Job design The act of specifying the contents and methods of jobs.
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Current practice in job design contains elements of two basic schools of thought. One might be called the efficiency school because it emphasizes a systematic, logical approach to job design; the other is called the behavioral school because it emphasizes satisfaction of wants and needs.
The efficiency approach, a refinement of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management concepts, received considerable emphasis in the past. The behavioral approach followed and has continued to make inroads into many aspects of job design. It is noteworthy that specialization is a primary issue of disagreement between the efficiency and behavioral approaches.
The term specialization describes jobs that have a very narrow scope. Examples range from assembly lines to medical specialties. College professors often specialize in teaching certain courses, some auto mechanics specialize in transmission repair, and some bakers specialize in wedding cakes. The main rationale for specialization is the ability to concentrate one’s efforts and thereby become proficient at that type of work.
Specialization Work that concentrates on some aspect of a product or service.
Sometimes the amount of knowledge or training required of a specialist and the complexity of the work suggest that individuals who choose such work are very happy with their jobs. This seems to be especially true in the “professions” (e.g., doctors, lawyers, professors). At the other end of the scale are assembly-line workers, who are also specialists, although much less glamorous. The advantage of these highly specialized jobs is that they yield high productivity and relatively low unit costs, and they are largely responsible for the high standard of living that exists today in industrialized nations.
Unfortunately, many of the lower-level jobs can be described as monotonous or downright boring, and are the source of much of the dissatisfaction among many industrial workers. While some workers undoubtedly prefer a job with limited requirements and responsibility for making decisions, others are not capable of handling jobs with greater scopes. Nonetheless, many workers are frustrated, and this manifests itself in turnover and absenteeism. In the automotive industry, for example, absenteeism runs as high as 20 percent. Workers may also take out their frustrations through disruptive tactics such as deliberate slowdowns.
In an effort to make jobs more interesting and meaningful, job designers frequently consider job enlargement, job rotation, job enrichment, and increased use of mechanization.
Job enlargement means giving a worker a larger portion of the total task. This constitutes horizontal loading—the additional work is on the same level of skill and responsibility as the original job. The goal is to make the job more interesting by increasing the variety of skills required and by providing the worker with a more recognizable contribution to the overall output. For example, a production worker’s job might be expanded so that he or she is responsible for a sequence of activities instead of only one activity.
Job enlargement Giving a worker a larger portion of the total task, by horizontal loading.
Job rotation means having workers periodically exchange jobs. This allows workers to broaden their learning experience and enables them to fill in for others in the event of sickness or absenteeism.
Job rotation Workers periodically exchange jobs.
Job enrichment involves an increase in the level of responsibility for planning and coordination tasks. It is sometimes referred to as vertical loading. An example of this is to have stock clerks in supermarkets handle the reordering of goods, thus increasing their responsibilities. The job enrichment approach focuses on the motivating potential of worker satisfaction.
Job enrichment Increasing responsibility for planning and coordination tasks, by vertical loading.
Job enlargement and job enrichment are also used in lean operations (covered in Chapter 14), where workers are cross-trained to be able to perform a wider variety of tasks and given more authority to manage their jobs.
The importance of these approaches to job design is that they have the potential to increase the motivational power of jobs by increasing worker satisfaction through improvement in the quality of work life.