Technology is changing people’s jobs and their work behavior. TQM and its emphasis on continuous process improvement can increase employee stress as individuals find that performance expectations are constantly being increased. Reengineering is eliminating millions of employees and completely reshaping the jobs of those who remain. Flexible manufacturing systems require employees to learn new skills and accept increased responsibilities. And technology is making many job skills obsolete and shortening the lifespan of almost all skills – technical, administrative, and managerial
An understanding of work design can help managers design jobs that positively affect employee motivation. For instance jobs that score high on the JCM increase an employee’s control over key elements in his or her work. Therefore, jobs that offer autonomy, feedback and similar complex task characteristics help to satisfy the individual goals of those employees who desire greater control over their work. Of course, consistent with the social information-processing model, the perception that task characteristics are complex is probably more important in influencing an employee’s motivation than are the objective task characteristics themselves. The key, then, is to provide employees with cues that suggest that their jobs score high on factors such as skill variety, task identity, autonomy, and feedback.
