Organizational Structure

Job Analysis and its Elements2

Significance for HR2

Position Analysis Questionnaire (PAQ)3

Fleishman Job Analysis System (FJA)5

Challenges and Suggestions in Job Designing6

Using Job Analysis for Performance Assessment7

References9

Organizational Structure

Job Analysis and its Elements

Job analysis is defined as the process by which the information about specifications of job can be obtained. It is a process of analysis which helps in identifying the essential characteristics that are required by the job holder.

The most important characteristics in this regard include the educational background, responsibilities, duties and degree of authority required for the job.

Job description is also the part of job analysis which summarizes the tasks that are required to be carried out by the job holder (Weinberger 2007). Thus the job specification and description are components of job analysis. The key elements that are considered when carrying out the job analysis process are:

Knowledge

Abilities

Skills (Weinberger 2007)

Knowledge includes the information possessed by the job holder to carry out required tasks in order to perform according to expectations. Skills are the proficiency levels of completing the task and abilities indicate the capabilities that will enable the individual to perform the job.

Significance for HR

Human resource department can gain multiple benefits from job analysis as the key information is generated from this process. The most significant and useful results of job analysis are:

Job redesigning which is intrinsically linked to the job analysis

Human resource planning that includes the consideration of the skills and required human resources and staffing leading to strategic planning of the organization

Selection of the right candidates as the skills, abilities and knowledge required for the job is available from job analysis (Palmer & Valet 2001)

Training of the employees according to their needs and with the expected results of increased effectiveness during the practical completion of tasks

Performance evaluation to distinguish the performances for bonuses and promotions

Career planning considering the aspirations and skills of the employees in case of the emerging opportunities for such individuals.

Job evaluation by establishing a pay structure that is fair and aligned to the work tasks after assessing the job (Konczak 2007)

Position Analysis Questionnaire (PAQ)

This is an instrument to carry out the job analysis. It was developed in 1972 and is effective in analyzing jobs on the basis of 195 elements. These elements are then related to the human characteristics in order to match the human behavior with the activities of job. This comprehensive instrument divides the assessment elements in five categories which are:

Mental processes including the reasoning skills of the worker

Sources and process of Information Input utilized by the worker

Work output produced by the worker including the tools used to generate the output and physical activities performed

Relationship of worker with others

Physical and social context of job

The PAQ is a quantitative instrument which increases the significance of this instrument to analyze the job. The quantitative nature of this instrument allows the scores to be calculated on different dimensions and thus different jobs can be compared (Oswald 2003).

For a customer service worker, the PAQ can be used to classify the jobs of the similar ...