Managing People



Assignment 1

I have chosen “Unit 2: Motivating People and Job Design” to critically analyze it with reference to Acme corporation where I worked for 1 year.

A vast body of knowledge supports the positive correlation between certain jobs and goal setting and motivation which eventually results in enhanced job performance of an employee. This assignment focuses on enhancing performance and motivation of an employee through his/her job design. All the concepts which we have learned in this concept are applied to the job design which affects motivation of Acme employees. Experience has shown that jobs that are well designed make a positive impact on employee satisfaction as well as quality performance quality of an employee. If jobs are well-designed, they enhance employee's motivation, performance and satisfaction. Thus for practitioners as well as academicians, job design holds a special importance for effectively motivating and managing the human resource of an organization. It is imperative for managers to design jobs that not only helps in reducing the stress of employees, but also motivate them to improve their performance which ultimately results in job satisfaction on the part of employees. Satisfied workforce becomes a core competency and helps organizations to effectively complete in the global marketplace. Initially, attention was paid to JE (Job Enrichment) only by organizations for designing the jobs of their employees which contributes in performance improvement and brings about job satisfaction. Now, a broader perspective has been taken by the job design and some other dimensions such as JEng (Job Engineering), SIPA (the social information processing approach), socio-technical designs, QWL (quality of work life) has been added to the concept and approach of job design in order to increase motivation and improve performance of employees. Now the model of job design with its added dimensions recognizes that certain job characteristics makes their contribution in certain psychological states of employees. These psychological states coupled with need for growth directly affect the motivation and performance of employees; therefore managers need to make a conscious effort to skew those psychological states of employees towards the overall improvement of an organization. This assignment has described the approaches Acme Corporation employs to design the jobs that emphasize on presence of motivators, intrinsic as well as extrinsic, in every job to make them more appealing and interesting for employees (Baer et al., 2003, Pp.569).

Job Design and Motivation at Acme Corporation

At Acme, two-factor theory is at the heart of every job design. The Two factor theory distinguishes between two certain types of factors or motivators. The first type of motivators is intrinsic to the work itself (e.g. responsibility, recognition and achievement). The other type of motivators is called hygiene factors which are extrinsic to work (e.g. supervision, pay and work conditions etc.). Acme management values the presence of hygiene factors as absolutely necessary to effectively manage and maintain human resource of the organization. Acme managers know that only challenging jobs can present employees with an opportunity for growth, advancement, recognition and achievement that ultimately ...