Biology Forums - Study Force

4. Job characteristics model (JCM) is a framework for analyzing and designing jobs that identifies five primary core job dimensions, their interrelationships, and their impact on outcomes. Please conduct an interview with managers, record how managers motivate his/her subordinates, and use the information in JCM to explain these motivating practices and its effect. Please explain in depth at least three motivating practices.

The job characteristics model explains how any monotonous or boring job, which has the tendency to reduce the motivation level of employees, can be improved to better performance levels. For example, the task assigned to the employees has greater role in increasing their motivation and performance. Thus, a job should be enriched with improving job variety, providing autonomy, feedback, task identity and task significance as its core dimensions.

Advantages of job characteristics model are:

• It provides the lower-level employees to gain authority and responsibility of their work. Thus, it promotes decentralization and self-reliance in the organization.

• It provides opportunity to employees to enhance their skills and efficiency by working on challenging and appealing jobs.
• It makes the organization to experience less employee turnover as job characteristics model facilitates team work and high commitment in employees.

Disadvantages of job characteristics model are:

• It may affect the focus of the employees on one job by constantly enlarging and enriching the job. Thus, it may impact their overall performance due to regular change in their work design.
• The managers may sometimes wrongly predict and design the task due to their strong control over the task design, which will again lead to conflicts and reduction in performance level.

While writing your answer, keep in mind how the job characteristics model describes jobs in terms of five core job dimensions:

Skill variety, the degree to which a job requires a variety of different activities;
Task identity, the degree to which a job requires completion of a whole and identifiable piece of work;
Task significance, the degree to which a job has an impact on the lives or work of other people;
Autonomy, the degree to which a job provides the worker freedom in scheduling; and
Feedback, the degree to which carrying out work activities generates direct and clear information about performance.

Hope that helps you get started. Anything else, let us know.

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