JOB ENRICHMENT

The most popularly advocated structural technique for increasing an employee's reward potential is job enrichment. To enrich a job, management allows the worker to assume some of the tasks executed by his or her supervisor. Enrichment requires that workers do increased planning and controlling of their work, usually with less supervision and more self-evaluation. From the standpoint of increasing the internal motivation from doing a job, it has been proposed that job enrichment offers great potential. This comes from the increased responsibility, increased employee's freedom and independence, organised tasks so as to allow individuals to do a complete activity, and providing feedback to allow individuals to correct their own performance. In addition, we can say that these factors lead, in part, to a better quality of work life. Furthermore, job-enrichment efforts will be successful only if the individuals in the enriched jobs find the "enrichment" rewarding. If these individuals do not want increased responsibility, for example, then increasing responsibility will not have the desired effect. Successful job enrichment, then, is contingent on worker input.

A sucessful job enrichment program should ideally increase employee satisfaction and commitment. But since organisations do not exist to create employee satisfation as an end, there must also be direct benefits to the organisation. There is evidence that job enrichment and quality of life programs produce lower absenteeism, reduce turnover costs, and increase employee, commitment, but on the critical issue of productivity, the evidence is inconclusive, or poorly measured. In some situtions, job enrichment has increased productivity; in others, productivity has been decreasd. However, when it decreases, there does appear to be a consistently conscientious use of resources and a higher quality of product or service. In other words, in terms of efficiency, for the same input a higher quality of output is obtained; so fewer repairs could increase productivity if the measure included the number of repairs.