everything else Flashcards
What is organizational learning?
Survival depends on the organization learning (adapting) at the same rate or faster than the environmental changes; learning must become a collective and not just an individual process; change comes from learning and learning comes from change
Criticisms of the organizational learning?
No agreed definition; scarcity of rigorous empirical evidence; organizations do not learn – people learn; requires the creation of organizational diversity and consensus at the same time
What is Employee Involvement and Participation?
A participative process that uses the input of employees to increase their commitment to the organization’s success
What are the two types of Employee involvement and participation (EIP)?
Participative management, representative participation
Participative management
subordinates share a significant degree of decision-making power with superiors; required conditions – issues must be relevant, employees must be competent and knowledgeable, all parties must act in good faith; only a modest influence on productivity, motivation, and job satisfaction
Representative participation
workers are represented by a small group of employees who participate in decisions affecting personnel – works councils, board membership; desires to redistribute power within an organization; does not appear to be very motivational
Types of concerns leading to job redesign
Business-oriented, people-oriented
Business-oriented concerns for job redesign
- Concern to be responsive to customer needs
- Concern to make maximum use of people’s skills
- Concern to make technology and people compatible
- Concern to maintain or improve quality
People-oriented concerns for job redesign
- Concern with people’s quality of working life (QoWL) and mental health
- Concern to help people to develop
- Concern to promote an organizational culture of proactivity and personal responsibility
- Concern with people’s work motivation
Vertical job loading
The empowerment of employees to:
- Set schedules, determine work methods, and decide when and how to check on the quality of the work produced
- Make their own decisions about when to start and stop work, when to take breaks, and how to assign priorities
- Seek solutions to problems on their own, consulting with others only as necessary, rather than calling immediately for the manager when problems arise
The job demand control model (Karasek)
- Low JC + Low JD = Passive work
- High JC + Low JD = Low strain
- High JC + High JD = Active work
- Low JC + High JD = High strain
Five core dimensions of Job Characteristics Model (JCM)
Skill variety
Task identity
Task significance
Autonomy
Job feedback
What kind of rewards to JCM-designed jobs give?
Internal
What do the core job characteristics produce?
‘Critical psychological states’
The ‘critical psychological states’ influence which three outcomes?
(intrinsic) motivation
(job) satisfaction
(work) effectiveness
Formula for the Motivating Potential Score (MPS)?
(outcome of STT:3) x Autonomy x Feedback
STT:3?
(Skill variety + Task Identity + Task significance) divided by 3
JCM Three meaningful factors
Skill Variety, Task Identity, Task significance
What substituted the “critical psychological states” from the original JCM in the revised JCM?
Psychological ownership
Job design approaches
Job rotation
Job engineering
Job enlargement
Job enrichment
Socio-technical systems
Ergonomics
Job Rotation
- Moving employees from job to job to add variety and reduce boredom
- From one routine job to another
- If all tasks are routine it will not improve job satisfaction
- May be beneficial if it is used as training and development tool to develop various employee competencies
- Low complexity and impact
- Horizontal job loading: Alleviates monotony and provides a fresh job challenge without increasing the level of responsibility
Job Engineering
- Focuses on tasks, methods and workflows
- Time and motion studies are done to make the work more efficient (Tayloristic)
- May lead to more automatization
- Important tool because resulting cost savings can be measured immediately (LEAN)
- Remain competitive
- Concern for social context
- Medium low complexity and impact
- Horizontal level of job loading
Job Enlargement
- Concentrates on increasing work variety
- Expansion of the number of different tasks performed by an employee in a single job
- More variety, more interesting if it demands increased attention and concentration
- An extension of job engineering
- If all tasks are routine it will not improve job satisfaction
- It eliminates the possibility to do the job automatically (to socialize and daydream)
- Medium complexity and impact
- Horizontal level of job loading: jobs remain the same, but of larger scale than before
Job Enrichment
- Focuses on increasing workers’ control over what they do
- Empowerment of employees to assume more responsibility and accountability for planning, organizing, performing, controlling, evaluating their own work
- The techniques used for enriching jobs are often specific to the job being redesigned
- Medium high complexity and impact
- Vertical job loading
Socio-technical systems
- Technology limits the scope for redesigning individual jobs
- Job design must go hand in hand with thechnological change to be successful
- The goal is to find the best possible match between the technology available, the people involved, and the organization’s needs
- Emphasizes the diagnosis of demands by external stakeholders and the internal adaptations needed to respond to those demands
- High complexity and impact
- Vertical job loading
The degree to which an organization operates according to the STS model depends on six concepts:
- Innovation
- Human resource development (including managing teams competency)
- Environmental agility
- Cooperation
- Commitment and energy
- Joint optimization
Ergonomics
- Focuses of minimizing the physical demands and risks of work
- Helps ensure that job demands are consistent with people’s physical capabilities to perform them without undue risk
- Involves the design of aids (hand tool, computer software, instruments, etc.) used to perform jobs
Workflow uncertainty
- The degree of knowledge that an employee has about when inputs will be received and require processing
Task uncertainty
The degree of knowledge that an employee has about how to perform the job and when it needs to be done
Little task uncertainty
clarity on how to do the task and produce the desired results
High task uncertainty
few (if any) methods to deal with a job’s task; requires experience, intuition, problem-solving skills and judgement from employees
Task interdependence
The degree to which decision making and cooperation between two or more employees is necessary for them to perform their jobs
Basic types of task interdependence
Pooled, Sequential, Reciprocal
Pooled interdependence
the ability of an employee (or team) to act independently of others in completing a task or tasks; an increase of pooled interdependence decreases the amount of task and/or workflow uncertainty
Sequential interdependence
the need for an employee (or team) to complete certain tasks before (or after) other employees (or teams) can perform their tasks; the output of some employees becomes the inputs for other employees
Reciprocal interdependence
the outputs from an individual (or a team) become the input for others and vice versa; common in everyday life; requires high degree of collaboration, communication, and team decision making
LEAN philosophy
How people should best be managed for optimum motivation and participation
LEAN principles
- Pull: Make what the customer wants; make what’s needed when we need it; production precision; actual consumption; small lots; low inventories
- One piece flow: produce one item at a time, then continue to the next
- Takt time: Produce at the correct speed, synchronized, just-in-time (JIT)
- Zero defects: Don’t pass on a defected product to the next phase
Other arrangements to increase QoWL (Quality of Working Life)?
Flextime
Telecommuting
Job sharing
Flextime
short for flexible working time; employees must work a specific number of hours per week but may vary their hours of work, within limits; can help employees balance work and family lives; not applicable to every job or every worker
Job sharing
Two or more individuals split a traditional job (i.e. two part-time employees, instead of one full-time employee)
Telecommuting
Work remotely at least two days per week
Six core factors to explain most of the variation in an individual’s QoWL
1. Job & Career Satisfaction (JCS): clarity of goals, role ambiguity, appraisal, recognition, rewards, personal development, training
2. General well-being (GWB): Mood, depression, and anxiety disorders; life satisfaction; general quality of life; optimism; happiness
3. Stress at Work (SAW): Demands at work; actual demand overload; perception of stress (pressure at work is not always leading to stress, but high stress is associated with high pressure)
4. Control at Work (CAW): communication at work – freedom to express opinions, social relations; being involved in decision making; controlling decisions
5. Home-Work interface (HWI): perceived support of employer in issues of family and home life of employee; adequate facilities at work; flexible working hours; understanding of managers
6. Working Conditions: resources provided to help people do their jobs; physical working conditions; safety and security; health issues – factors influencing health
