DEJOBBING

Dejobbing

Dejobbing

Discussion and Analysis

Whether specialized, enlarged, or enriched, workers still generally have specific jobs to do, and these jobs have required job descriptions and job analysis. In many firms today, however, jobs are becoming more amorphous (unorganized, vague) and more difficult to define. In other words, the trend is towards dejobbing. Dejobbing is “broadening the responsibilities of the company jobs, and encouraging employees not to limit themselves to what's on their job descriptions.”

De jobbing is the result of several changes taking place in business today. Firms need to keep pace with a number of revolutionary forces- accelerating product and technological changes, global competition, deregulation, political instability, demographic changes, and a shift to a service oriented economy and the arrival of the information age. Forces like these have changed the playing field on which firms compete. This rapid change has increased the need for firms to be responsive, flexible, and generally more competitive and capable of competing in a global market place (Bennis et al, 1994).

Flattening organizations, creating empowered teams, re-engineering and the like are the techniques which make firms highly responsive, flexible and competitive. Firms are slowly moving towards new configurations, ones built around jobs that are broad and that may change everyday. People in such situations no longer can take their cues from job descriptions or a supervisor's instructions. Signals come from changing demands of work. Workers learn to focus on their individual effort and collective resources in such work that need doing. They change as the need of the hour changes (Drucker, 1993).

Reasons for dejobbing the organization

The organizational methods managers use to accomplish the various changes have helped weaken the meaning of job as a well- defined and clearly delineated set of responsibilities. Here is a sampling of organizational factors that have contributed to this weakening and to encouraging workers not to limit themselves to narrowly defined jobs (O'Hara, 1986).

Flatter Organizations

Instead of traditional, pyramid-shaped organizations with seven or more management layers, flat organizations with just three or four levels are more prevalent. Most large firms have already cut their management layers from a dozen to six or fewer. Because the remaining managers have more people reporting to them, they can supervise them less, so the jobs of subordinates end up bigger in terms of both breadth and depth of responsibilities (Handy, 1994)..

Work Teams

Managers increasingly organize tasks around teams and processes rather than around specialized functions. For example, at Chesebrough-Ponds USA, a subsidiary of Unilever, mangers replaced a traditional pyramidal organization with multi-skilled, cross functional, and self-directed teams; the latter now run the plant's four product areas. Hourly employees make employee assignments, schedule overtime, establish production times and changeovers, and even handle cost control, requisitions, and work orders. They also are solely responsible for quality control under the plant's continuous quality improvement program. In an organization like this, employee's jobs change daily; there is thus an intentional effort to avoid having employees view their jobs as a specific, narrow set of responsibilities (Bridges, ...