Job design

About: Job design is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 9218 publications have been published within this topic receiving 426180 citations.

The cognitive task analysis methods for job and task design: review and reappraisal

Abstract: This paper reviews and reappraises the current research on the cognitive task analysis methodology for job or task design and analysis. Specifically, it classifies the current cognitive task analysis methods for job or task design and analysis, sorts out commonalities and differences among all these cognitive task analysis methodology for job and task design and analysis by conducting pros and cons comparisons, and provides guidelines in selecting cognitive task analysis methods for job and task design and analysis. Moreover, based on the current literature review, a validated human-centered information-processing model for cognitive task performance was developed based on human information processing theory. This new model focuses on identifying all cognitive aspects of human performance in technical work, with the goal of assisting job (re)design to increase human job performance.

Job Satisfaction and Job Affect

Abstract: Job satisfactions – multidimensional psychological responses to one’s job – have a long and rich tradition of research in psychology. Comparing and contrasting job attitudes with social attitudes, the present chapter presents various theoretical models of job attitudes. These theoretical approaches give rise to an integrative model which draws most heavily from the Cornell model of job attitudes. We then consider newer theoretical approaches, including engagement, affective events, personality, and unit-level satisfaction. Capitalizing on recent trends in personality, affect, and multilevel research, we also present a core self-evaluations multilevel model. We conclude with a discussion of measurement issues in job satisfaction research. Job Affect and Job Satisfaction 3 Job Satisfaction and Job Affect Employees may and often do have many attitudes about their job and their work. These attitudes vary along many dimensions, including target, specificity, intensity, salience, and stability. In this chapter we discuss portions of the theoretical and empirical literature on one job attitude: job satisfaction. Job satisfaction is an application of the original conceptual definitions of social attitudes although the deviations that job attitudes have taken from these beginnings are as important as the direct linear connections. We discuss theoretical models of antecedents of job satisfactions. Our discussion of these theoretical models emphasizes constructs (e.g., frames of reference, organizational withdrawal), rather than individual variables, as manifestations of the constructs (e.g., local unemployment, turnover); there are more individual variables that may be regarded as antecedents or consequences of job attitudes than can be reasonably discussed in this chapter. We focus our discussion on three general areas: the theoretically necessary breadth of measures of constructs, the strength and generality of the job satisfaction/job behavior relationship, and new directions of job attitude research. We discuss differences and similarities between social attitudes and job satisfactions in terms of their relations with individual job behaviors and general behavioral constructs. Our juxtaposition of job satisfactions with social attitudes is important for several reasons. First, though it is reasonable, perhaps even necessary, to view job satisfactions as social attitudes, there are important differences between these concepts; the differences may tell us as much about social attitudes as they do about job satisfactions. Second, the differences may also suggest questions about the ecological validity of investigations of social attitudes that have studied a limited range of populations, settings, and content or targets of the attitudes. In short, the social attitudes literature has revealed many insights into psychology, but it is often limited by what Job Affect and Job Satisfaction 4 (e.g., overwhelmingly, political or cultural attitudes or identities, as opposed to contextual attitudes about one’s job, one’s life, one’s family, etc.), with whom (e.g., a heavy reliance on college undergraduates, which may limit the scope and nature of the investigations), and how (e.g., behavior is often not studied, or is studied in a sterile, though well controlled, experimental context) attitudes are studied. That the job satisfaction literature often addresses these issues suggests that social attitudes researchers would benefit as much from reading the job attitudes literature as the converse. Finally, and as we note immediately below, although theorizing about the nature of social attitudes has served job attitudes research well, some of these theoretical concepts are increasingly being challenged, usually implicitly, by new developments from many areas of psychological research. We address the departure of the study of job attitudes from the original tripartite definitions of social attitudes that emphasized cognitive, affective, and behavioral elements of attitude space (Campbell, 1963; Thurstone, 1928). Past studies on job satisfaction have focused on judgment based, cognitive evaluations of jobs on characteristics or features of jobs and generally ignored affective antecedents of evaluations of jobs as well as the episodic events that happen on jobs. Accordingly, we devote considerable space in this review to the affective nature of job satisfaction, and how consideration of job affect necessitates revision in how we conceptualize and measure job satisfaction, how we relate the concept to other variables, and how we study job attitudes and affect. Other topics—such as job satisfaction at the between-unit level of analysis, and the contrast between job satisfaction and employee engagement—are also discussed. Job Affect and Job Satisfaction 5 Definition and Nature of Job Satisfaction We define job satisfaction as follows: Job satisfactions are multidimensional psychological responses to one’s job. These responses have cognitive (evaluative) and affective (emotional) components. Although cognitions are easier to separate from affect in theory than in practice (Adolphs & Damasio, 2001), isolating the two components conceptually does not deny their close – at certain levels inseparable – connections. Job satisfactions refer to internal evaluations of the favorability of one’s job. These evaluations are revealed by outward (i.e., verbalized) and inward (i.e., felt) emotional responses. The multidimensional responses can be arrayed along good/bad, positive/negative continua. They may be quantified using assessment techniques that assess evaluations of features or characteristics of the job, emotional responses to events that occur on the job, and, depending on how one defines attitudes, behavioral dispositions, intentions, and enacted behaviors. We intentionally define job satisfactions in the plural to recognize that while it is meaningful to consider job satisfaction in a global or general sense, it is no less meaningful to consider satisfactions with more specific aspects of one’s job (one’s pay, one’s coworkers, and so on). Our definition is consistent with definitions of social attitudes offered by Campbell (1963), Eagley and Chaiken (1993), Fishbein (1980), Fishbein and Ajzen (1972; 1975), Thurstone (1928), Triandis (1980), and others. These definitions stress the role of cognitive evaluations in social attitudes but also include affect and behaviors as components of attitudes. Eagley and Chaiken, for example, defined an attitude as a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor. However, they include overt and covert (subconscious) cognitive, affective, and behavioral classes of responding as well. Job Affect and Job Satisfaction 6 The original tripartite conceptual definition of attitudes comprising cognitive, affective, and behavioral elements has eroded in industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology until we are left with assessments of attitudes as cognitive evaluations of social objects. This change seems to have occurred almost by default, perhaps as a result of the Zeitgeist in American psychology that has led to the adoption of theoretical positions favoring cognitions even in the absence of definitive data (Zajonc, 1980; 1984). The “cognitive revolution” served psychology well. The many contributions of this revolution–and there have been many–notwithstanding, we are in the midst of another revolution. This “affective revolution” (Barsade, Brief, & Spataro, 2003) does not deny cognition. It is less oppositional than augmentative. It acknowledges that affective reactions have an evaluative component. Affective responses are more than evaluations, just as all evaluative judgments are not affective, although affect may influence cognitive evaluations. Evaluations of an object very likely influence emotional responses to the object to an unknown degree; the two types of responses are not the same. Cranny, Smith, and Stone (1992) stated that “Although a review of published works shows that constitutive definitions of the construct vary somewhat from one work to the next, there appears to be general agreement that job satisfaction is an affective (that is emotional) reaction to a job that results from the incumbent’s comparison of actual outcomes with those that are desired (expected, deserved, and so on)” (p. 1, emphasis added). This definition appears to assume that comparisons of actual outcomes with those desired from a job will reflect variance due to emotional reactions and that these emotional reactions can be captured using structured, paper and pencil measures of judgments and evaluations. There is little doubt that until very Job Affect and Job Satisfaction 7 recently this was the generally agreed upon definition; comparisons of job outcomes with desired outcomes were treated as a reasonable basis for measurement of job attitudes. As a result of the focus of research on satisfaction as a stable individual difference variable, we have a good picture of a network of relations, with job attitudes--assessed as cognitive-affective evaluations of job characteristics--as its core construct. These relations are useful and reliable (Roznowski & Hulin, 1992). This network, however, is a deficient view of the broader construct of job attitudes that includes affective or emotional reactions. Weiss and Cropanzano (1996) and George (1989) have argued that affect and mood on the job are important components of job attitudes and potentially important predictors of some job behaviors. The possibility that on-the-job affect will spillover, more generally than do job attitudes, to non-job behaviors that reflect “emotional well-being” cannot be overlooked. Testing a theory that includes affect, however, requires assessments that capture the dynamic, within person manifestations of affect and emotional reactions. Otherwise we become enmeshed in a methodological st

Granovetter Was Right The Importance of Weak Ties to a Contemporary Job Search

Abstract: Using a longitudinal research design, the authors investigate the impact of the relative growth or decline of a job seeker’s predisplaced industry on the use of personal contacts in the job search ...

Job attitudes and employee motivation: theory, research, and practice

Abstract: Industrial psychologists have been seriously concerned with the measurement, interpretation and implications of job attitudes ever since the Western Electric Studies (Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939). When Herzberg et al. (1957) reviewed the literature as of 1955, they pointed out that there were severed thousand studies in the psychological literature that were concerned with job attitudes. At the present time there must be at least five thousand studies in the literature. Most of these job attitude studies have had as their major focus job satisfaction.