Visty Banaji
‘If you want people to do a good job, give them a good job to do’ Frederick Herzberg’s words ring as true today as when he wrote them decades ago. Job Enrichment needs to be at the top of HR’s agenda if employees – and GIG workers – are to be truly motivated
The road less travelled
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here was a single Holy Grail that many of us pursued when I started my career in HR. I can’t divulge how long ago that was but a chap called Sir Galahad was on a similar chase around the same time. We were looking for ways to enrich jobs. Once we had that philosophers' stone for turning dross jobs to gold, we believed we would not have to worry (or, at least, not so much) about external motivators like incentives (which had crippling side-effects) or tedious-to-arrange hygiene benefits like bus transport to work and health insurance, all of which were preventing us from doing more exciting things. It was Herzberg who set the ball rolling (at least for HR practitioners) with his clarion query: "One More Time: How do You Motivate Employees?"1. It echoed around the HR world and team after team set off on the same pursuit. Working as we were then in India’s | June 2021
latest state-of-the-art automobile plant coming up on the outskirts of Poona (now Pune) we were mightily excited by the productivity and job satisfaction gains made by Volvo, a European automobile manufacturer, through job enrichment.2 The next major step forward in developing the theory was taken by Hackman and Oldham a few years after the Volvo experiment. They critiqued Herzberg (saying "the present conceptual status of the theory
must be considered highly uncertain"3) as well as the activation and socio-technical systems theories while providing their own job characteristics model which continues to hold its own in Job Enrichment literature almost half a century later. "At the most general level, five 'core' job dimensions are seen as prompting three psychological states which, in turn, lead to several beneficial personal and work outcomes." 3 The 'core' job dimensions identified by them were:
