This assignment is based on Nursing Leadership.
Work design is an area of research and practice within organizational psychology, and is concerned with work tasks, activities, relationships, and responsibilities. Research has demonstrated that work design has important implications for employee engagement, organizational teams and how effectively teams coordinate their activities, affecting organizational productivity. There are multiple theories discussed within the area of work design. Job characteristics theory is a theory of work design. It provides a set of implementing principles for enriching jobs. Job characteristics theory proposes a model of five “core” job characteristics: skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback. These five core characteristics are believed to affect five work-related outcomes of motivation, satisfaction, performance, and absenteeism and turnover. There is also the work redesign. This is the process of rearranging tasks and responsibilities to better align roles with the changing environment inside and outside the organization. Work redesign strategies may include Job enlargement, job rotation, task revision and idiosyncratic deals.
If we pay close attention to the principles of work design and redesign, we can also see the elements of HRO and the principles of commitment to resiliency. For example, to practice commitment to resiliency, quick, accurate feedback is required, similar to job characteristics theory. Idiosyncratic deals in work redesign, describe non-standard work arrangements individual employees negotiate with employers such as flexible work hours and special assignments. Taking on special assignments exposes the employee to new practices, thereby increasing competencies and response repertoires, leading to better resiliency.
Questions
Which work design process would you implement at your organization and why? How do you know it would be effective?
How would you best address variations in processes?
References
AIHR. (2021, December 8). Job redesign: A practical guide to redesigning jobs & roles. AIHR. Retrieved February 17, 2022, from
Parker, Sharon K. (2014, Jan 3). “Beyond Motivation: Job and Work Design for Development, Health, Ambidexterity, and More”. Annual Review of Psychology. 65 (1): 661–691. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115208.
Weick, K.E., & Sutcliffe, K. M. (2015). Managing the Unexpected: Sustained Performance in a Complex World (3rd ed.). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Wong, Chi-sum; Campion, Michael A. (1991). “Development and test of a task level model of motivational job design”. Journal of Applied Psychology. 76 (6): 825–837