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05 Slides MBA Week 5 HRM and The Design of Work

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05 Slides MBA Week 5 HRM and The Design of Work

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nirmikacf
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MN7181

People and Organisations: Principles and


Practice in Global Contexts
Lecture 5
HRM and the Design of Work
Learning Outcomes

• To understand the progression from Taylorism toward a


perspective of the organization as a social system.
• know about developments in job design and especially
the principles of the autonomous work group.
• To understand the principles of team formation and
appreciate the team roles required for effective
teamwork.
• To see why organisations seek flexibility in work
patterns.
• To have some appreciation of the organisation of work
beyond the team level.
Work Design

• ‘Work design is the creation of systems of work and a


working environment that enhance organizational
effectiveness and productivity, ensure the organization
becomes a “great place in which to work” and are
conducive to the health, safety and wellbeing of
employees’.
Armstrong (2014, p. 136),
Job Design

• ‘Job design specifies the contents of jobs in order to


satisfy work requirements and meet the personal needs
of the job holder, thus increasing levels of employee
engagement.’
• Armstrong (2014, p. 145)
Job design in the context of personnel as a
‘cost’ to the business

• Taylorism and Fordism


– management studying the work methods for each job
– establishing the most efficient methods
• Scientific management: time and motion studies
• Fordism; increased division of labour
Job design begins to recognise needs and
broader contribution of the worker

• Early industrial revolution: personnel had a welfare role


• Consider origins Cadbury, Rowntree.
• Rise of trade unionism: industrial relations role
• The Hawthorne studies
‘soft’ HR tracks through to Mayo (1933), who founded the
Human Relations school and McGregor (1960) who
recognised that the needs of both the organisation and
the individual need to be recognised
Greater emphasis on the HRM orientation is
further stimulated by:

• The Great Depression (1929-1939)


• ‘Loss of faith’ in traditional mass-production techniques
(Henderson, 2017)
• The eclipse of US management practices by those used
in Japan in the 80s.
• E.g. Pascale, Managing on the Edge (1990)
After Taylorism

• ‘Maslow’s influence is clearly stamped across the work


design theories and practices of the latter half of the
twentieth century.’
(Buchanan, 1994)
Maslow

Theory of Motivation’ (1954) was the study of ‘ultimate human goals’.


Maslow’s work:
Emphasised primacy of individual needs
Drew attention to different ways in which cultures impact on the
satisfaction of these needs (Bloisi,, 2007)
General principles derived from ‘motivation theory’
(Maslow, 1954)
• Importance of ‘self-actualisation’ of workers at an
individual level
• Set goals.
• Involve the employees concerned in designing and
agreeing the goals.
• ‘‘Stretch’ goals’ lead to significant increases in employee
performance.
• Link rewards to performance when possible.
• Increase employees’ sense of ‘self-efficacy’ (confidence
that they can perform the job or task well).
General principles derived from motivation theory
(cont’d)

• Let employees know the expected level of performance


and give them accurate and timely feedback.
• Giving positive rewards for good performance is more
effective in motivating people then punishing them for
poor performance.
• Perceived fairness or equity is vital to the motivation.
SMART Goals

• Specific
• Measurable
• Assignable
• Realistic
• Time-bound
McGregor

Influenced by Maslow’s theme of self-actualisation. Douglas McGregor


wrote The Human Side of the Enterprise’ (1961). McGregor’s perspective
embraced the themes of ‘participation, openness, trust, exchange and a
resolution of the conflict between personal and organisational goals’
(ibid, foreword by G.Bennis).

McGregor developed the concepts of Theory X and Theory Y


Theory x: ‘people are a cost that must be monitored and controlled’
Theory Y: ‘people are an asset that should be valued and developed’

Also made the following observation: ‘The capacity to exercise a


relatively high degree of imagination, ingenuity and creativity in the
solution of organizational problems is widely, not narrowly distributed in
the population.’ (ibid)
The Autonomous Work Group (AWG)

• Work should be organized in teams.


• Individual jobs should provide:
– Variety;
– A meaningful task;
– An optimum work cycle;
– Worker’s control over work standards;
– Feedback of results;
– A perceived contribution to end product.
• The AWG concept is not dependent on any specific
technology so it applicable in virtually all work situations.

(Henderson, 2017)
Toyota Production System (TPS)

• Features of both AWG and Taylorism?


– Just–in-Time (JIT) production processes.
– Teamwork
– Jidoka quality principle (error–free processes)
– Standardized work and kaizen (continuous
improvement )
Stages in Team Development

• Forming
• Storming
• Norming
• Performing
• Adjourning
Team Roles (Belbin)

• Chairperson (or Coordinator)


• Company worker (or Implementer)
• Completer-finisher
• Monitor-evaluator
• Plant
• Resource investigator
• Shaper
• Team worker
• Specialist

Belbin website: http://www.belbin.com/


Organising beyond the team level

• By Product
• By Function
• Matrix Structure
• Divisionalisation
Flexibility

• Employers pursue flexibility to:


– minimize human resource costs in both the short and
long run.
– protect the core from short term, fluctuations in
market demand.
– respond to the demands of an increasingly diverse
workforce in terms of (i) legal compliance and (ii)
discretionary entitlement to attract/retain Core
employees.
Types of flexibility (Henderson, 2017)

• Functional flexibility
– employees can be redeployed quickly to new tasks
and activities (e.g. multi-skilled craftsmen and team-
workers).
• Numerical flexibility
– enabling the organisation quickly to increase and
decrease the numbers employed in response to
market demand.
• Financial flexibility
– pay systems that reinforce the requirement for
flexibility (e.g. performance-related pay, pay-for-skills).
Some alternatives to full-time permanent
employment

• Temporary working
• Part-time working
• Job-sharing
• Home-working
New forms of employment (Henderson, 2017)
• Employee sharing, where an individual worker is jointly
hired by a group of employers.
• Interim management, in which highly skilled experts are
hired temporarily for a specific project or to solve a
specific problem
• Casual work, where an employer is not obliged to
provide work regularly to the employee but has the
flexibility of calling them on demand.
• Voucher-based work where the employment
relationship is based on payment for services with a
voucher purchased form an authorised organisation that
covers both pay and social security contributions.
• Portfolio work where a self-employed individual works
for a large number of clients
New forms of employment (Cont’d)

• New forms of employment which utilize Information and


Communications Technology (ICT), such as ‘crowd
working’ (Henderson, 2017)

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