Work Matters: Job Design in Classic and Contemporary Perspectives - Part 7 PDF

■ ■ Alternating complex tasks with routine ones can balance pressure and relaxation, fostering creativity and reducing stress eg Knowledge workers are chronically overloaded ● Solution: Enhance creativity of knowledge workers by regularly scheduling simple tasks with low cognitive difficulty and lo...

■ ■ Alternating complex tasks with routine ones can balance pressure and relaxation, fostering creativity and reducing stress eg Knowledge workers are chronically overloaded ● Solution: Enhance creativity of knowledge workers by regularly scheduling simple tasks with low cognitive difficulty and low performance pressure Future Directions ● Steps to incorporate contextual changes in the job world: ○ Focus on new social and knowledge characteristics of jobs ○ Consider temporal characteristics of jobs ○ Explore macroscopic environmental variables as antecedents & moderators of job design Characteristics of jobs are rapidly changing ● Shift from manufacturing to service economy: ○ Increase in task interdependence and use of teams ○ Jobs more embedded in and interconnected to interpersonal relationships ● Social characteristics ■ Increased use of teams ■ New social characteristics of jobs: ● Social desirability and status ● Task identity - working for a cause ● Responsibility - employee, collegues and environment ● Friendship opportunities - virtualisation of work as a threat ■ Need for further research on social features of virtual work and coworking spaces ● Knowledge characteristics ○ Scope and importance of knowledge work increasing ○ Globalization and global operations growing ○ Employee involvement in job design increasing ○ Increasing unpredictability and uncertainty ○ Design of knowledge intensive, virtual and creative jobs more important ○ Affect task characteristics (eg autonomy, use of technology) ● Temporal job characteristics ○ Time pressure and work cycles ○ Dynamic relationships among task and knowledge characteristics ○ Not yet fully captured temporal characteristics themselves (eg 4 day week)