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Chapter 4. The Analysis and Design of Work - Coggle Diagram
Chapter 4. The Analysis and Design of Work
Work-Flow Analysis and Organization Structure
Work-flow design
The process of analyzing the tasks necessary for the
production of a product or service.
Allocate and assigning these tasks to a particular job category or person.
After understanding, we can make informed decisions regarding how to initially bundle various tasks into discrete jobs that can be executed by a single person.
Organization structure
Relatively stable and formal network of vertical and horizontal interconnections among jobs that constitute the organization.
After understanding, we can make informed decisions about how to redesign or improve jobs to benefit the entire organization.
Work-flow analysis
Analyzing Work Processes
Every process consists of operating procedures that specify how things should be done at each stage of the development of the product.
Include all the tasks that must be performed
in the production of the output.
Activities that members of a work unit engage in to
produce a given output.
Analyzing Work Inputs
Inputs can be broken down into the raw materials, equipment, and human skills needed to perform the tasks.
Raw materials consist of the materials that will be converted into the work unit’s product.
Equipment refers to the technology and machinery necessary to transform the raw materials into the product.
Human skills consist of the workers available to the company.
Work should be delegated to the lowest-cost employee who can do the work well, and in some cases this principle is violated when too much emphasis is placed on reducing headcount.
Identify the inputs used in the development of the work unit’s product.
Analyzing Work Outputs
An output can also be a service, such as an airline that transports you to some destination, a housecleaning service that maintains your house, or a babysitter who watches over your
children.
The number and nature of the outputs chosen create challenges for how to efficiently process the inputs in order to generate the outputs.
An output is the product of a work unit and this is often an identifiable object such as a jet engine blade, a forklift, or a football jersey.
Organization structure analysis
Structural Configurations
Functional structure
A functional departmentalization scheme with
relatively high levels of centralization.
Tend to identify with their department and cannot always be relied on to make decisions that are in the best interests of the organization as a whole.
Divisional structure
Combine a divisional departmentalization scheme with relatively
low levels of centralization.
Units in these structures act almost like separate, self-sufficient, semi-autonomous organizations.
Dimensions of Structure
Centralization: decision-making authority resides at the top of the organizational chart as opposed to being distributed throughout lower levels.
Departmentalization: work units are grouped based on functional similarity or similarity of work flow.
Job Analysis
The importance of job analysis: job analysis is the building block of everything that human resource managers do.
Training and development
Training will prepare individuals to perform their jobs effectively.
Almost every employee hired by an organization will require training.
Performance Appraisal
Get information about how well each employee is performing.
Reward those who are effective.
Improve the performance of those who are ineffective.
Provide a written justification for why the poor performer
should be disciplined.
Selection
Identify the most qualified applicants for employment.
Determine the tasks that will be performed by the individual hired and the knowledge, skills, and abilities the individual must have to perform the job effectively.
Career Planning
Match an individual’s skills and aspirations with opportunities that are or may become available in the organization.
This process requires that those in charge of career planning know the skill requirements of the various jobs.
Human resource planning
Analyze an organization’s human resource needs in a dynamic environment and develop activities that enable a firm to adapt to change.
Require accurate information about the levels of skill required in
various jobs to ensure that enough individuals are available in the organization to meet the human resource needs of the strategic plan.
Job Evaluation
Assess the relative dollar value of each job to the organization to set up internally equitable pay structures.
If pay structures are not equitable, employees will be dissatisfied and quit, or they will not see the benefits of striving for promotions.
Work redesign
Redesign work to make it more efficient or effective.
Redesign a job will be similar to analyzing a job that does not yet exist.
To redesign the work, detailed information about the existing job(s) must be available.
The importance of job analysis to line managers
Managers need to understand the job requirements to make intelligent hiring decisions.
Managers are responsible for ensuring that each individual is performing satisfactorily.
Managers must have detailed information about all the
jobs in their work group to understand the work-flow process.
Managers are responsible for ensuring that the work is being done safely, know where potential hazards might manifest themselves and create a climate where people feel free to interrupt the production process if dangerous conditions exist.
It is important for organizations to understand and match job requirements and people to achieve high-quality performance.
Job analysis information
Job analysis methods
The Occupational Information Network (O*NET)
The Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) served as a vehicle for helping the new public employment system link the demand for skills and the supply of skills in the U.S. workforce.
The O*NET describe the literacy requirements associated with alternative jobs.
Position Analysis Questionnaire (PAQ)
Work output: the physical activities, tools, and devices used by the worker to perform the job.
Relationships with other persons: the relationships with other
people required in performing the job.
Mental processes—The reasoning, decision making, planning, and information-processing activities that are involved in performing the job.
Job context: the physical and social contexts where the work is
performed.
Information input: where and how a worker gets information needed to perform the job.
Other characteristics: the activities, conditions, and characteristics other than those previously described that are relevant to the job.
Nature of Information
Job descriptions: a list of the tasks, duties, and
responsibilities (TDRs) that a job entails. TDRs are observable actions.
Job specifications: a list of the knowledge, skills, abilities,
and other characteristics (KSAOs) that an individual must have to perform the job.
The process of getting detailed information about
jobs.
Job Design
Motivational Approach
Focus on increasing the meaningfulness of jobs through such interventions as job enlargement, job enrichment, and the construction of jobs around socio-technical systems.
Job Characteristics Model
Autonomy is the degree to which the job allows an individual to make decisions about the way the work will be carried out.
Feedback is the extent to which a person receives from the work itself clear information about performance effectiveness.
Task identity is the degree to which a job requires completing a “whole” piece of work from beginning to end.
Task significance is the extent to which the job has an important impact on the lives of other people.
Skill variety is the extent to which the job requires a variety of skills to carry out the tasks.
Focus on the job characteristics that affect psychological meaning and motivational potential, and it views attitudinal variables as the most important outcomes of job design.
Mechanistic approach
Identify the simplest way to structure work that maximizes efficiency.
Entail reducing the complexity of the work to provide more human resource efficiency, making the work so simple that anyone can be trained quickly and easily to perform it.
Focus on designing jobs around the concepts of task specialization, skill simplification, and repetition.
Scientific management
Productivity could be maximized by taking a scientific approach to the process of designing jobs.
Identify the “one best way” to perform the job.
Workers should be selected based on their ability to do
the job.
Workers should be trained in the standard “one best way” to perform the job.
Workers should be offered monetary incentives to motivate them
to work at their highest capacity.
Perceptual-motor Approach
The goal is to design jobs in a way that ensures they do not exceed people’s mental capabilities and limitations.
Try to improve reliability, safety, and user reactions by designing jobs to reduce their information-processing requirements.
Focus on human mental capabilities and limitations.
The process of defining how work will be performed and
the tasks that will be required in a given job.
Biological Approach
Comes primarily from the sciences of biomechanics work physiology, and occupational medicine, and it is usually referred to as ergonomics.
The goal of this approach is to minimize physical strain on
the worker by structuring the physical work environment around the way the human body works.
Ergonomics is concerned with examining the interface between
individuals’ physiological characteristics and the physical work environment.
Focus on outcomes such as physical fatigue, aches and pains, and health complaints.
Applied in redesigning equipment used in jobs that are physically demanding.