APPROACHES TO JOB ANALYSIS AND CHANGING NATURE OF WORK

 Approaches to Job Analysis

Two main approaches to job analysis are as under.

1.       1. The Engineering Approach

This approach is based on the work of German sociologist Max Webber who form the basis of system of bureaucracy and the  F.W. Taylor who is considered  as the father  of Scientific management.  According to this approach jobs are designed in such a way that there is clear and strict division of work which enables workers to specialize in a particular task and thus become more productive. However problem with this approach is that workers soon get bored with doing similar jobs and become demotivated.

2.       2. The Human Relation Approach

According to this approach human beings get fed up with doing similar jobs (as mentioned above in Engineering approach) therefore jobs should be designed based on job enlargement, rotation and enrichment thus helping employees to increase their skills as well as avoiding the de-motivation and boredom problem.

By job enlargement it means adding more work and responsibility in to existing job, job rotation means moving a person from one position to another or from one location to another to increase their knowledge and skills while job enrichment means re-designing job which give employees more autonomy and responsibility. 

Job Analysis and changing nature of Work and Organizations

Job analysis is becoming more and more difficult and partially absolute in modern organization. This is because of the following reasons.

• Downsizing is a way forward for many organizations. When an organization downsizes its workforce, more and more work is diverted to the rest of the staff thus making job analysis and job design irrelevant.

• Flatter Hierarchy; more and more organization are delegating their work to the lower level of organization and removing unnecessary managerial layers which is making the process of job design more difficult.

• Self-Managed work teams; previously job design was used to assign work to the workers, however now many organization such as Toyota, Microsoft have introduced the concept of self-managed teams.  These are the teams who decide themselves about their leader, their processes, their timing and objectives. Now because of self-managed teams job design becomes irrelevant because work is not needed to assign to such teams as they decide themselves about their work.

• Re-Engineering; many organizations are involved in business process re-engineering such as Just in Time Inventory (JIT). As organizations are re-engineering their work, there is less need for job design because jobs are changing along with re-engineering so there is less need for job design.