.Pilbeam Chapter 14 The strategic management of employee well-being
. A plan for creating a wellbeing environment
. Stress - distress is positive, distress is bad for all stakeholders
. Bullying and violence bad
. Certain roles and sectors more likely to show violent exchanges
.. process and layout changes do reduce likelihood but involvement of staff is key for vbuy in
.. alcohol and drugs use is linked to a lot of violent incidents
.. clear violence handling protocols and training do bring likelihood down
. Torrington Chapter 26 Health and well-being
. Together, skill variety, task identity and tasks significancecomprise the ‘meaningfulness’ of the work undertaken.Jobdesign should aim to achieve all three in order to promotem motivationin workers and thus higher performance.
. Stress management and physical well being are focus but other HSE areas are very important and can be tackled through job design, thus also impactful for more productive workforce and personal wellbeing
. JCM job characteristics model fig 26.1
. Post office royal mail blueprint wellbeing programme which was assessed for actual improvements
.Takhar, S. Singh ‘Should you prioritise ‘mentalh ealth’ over performance?’, Raconteur, 5 March 2019.
.
here are the following key concepts that you discussed in Topic 9:
- Wellness at work
- Wellness strategy
- Stress (causes, implications, management)
- Bullying and harassment
- Alcohol misuse and drug abuse
- Violence
After completing the study of this topic you should be able to:
1. Discuss the nature of employee wellbeing in an organisational context
2. Outline the range of initiatives that sit within an employee wellbeing agenda
3. Develop the case for a strategic approach to employee wellbeing for the benefit of the employer and the employee
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Skill variety
Skill variety is the extent to which the tasks in a job require a range of skills and
abilities. Jobs designed in accordance with scientific management principles were
highly specialised, requiring a narrow range of skills and abilities, and the negative
outcomes arising from the boredom and monotony created by this became evident.
The JCM suggested that jobs should require workers to use a wide range of skills and
abilities and led to a focus on job enrichment, the process of incorporating more
skills and abilities into jobs. Wood and Wall (2007) make a case for the continuing
importance of job enrichment in job design, arguing that it has been overlooked in
strategic HRM and that it should continue to be a key element within HRM
endeavour.
Task identity
Task identity refers to the degree to which a job provides the opportunity to
undertake a whole and identifiable piece of work. Completing such a piece of work is
critical to positive psychological outcomes, the negative impact of not doing this
again being apparent from, for example, the alienation caused by working on an
assembly line. Car manufacturers such as Volvo have over the years experimented
with principles such as autonomous work teams, where a team are tasked with the
construction of an entire car, rather than individuals being tasked with specified
elements of it, in order to provide this task identity. While such experiments have not
been unproblematic, they are an attempt to design jobs so as to provide workers
with meaningful work.
Task significance
Task significance is the extent to which a job has an impact, whether on the
organisation, its employees or customers. The more impact a job is seen to have, the
better the psychological outcomes for the worker. A key aspect of job design is thus
that workers should understand the contribution made by their job to the
organisational endeavour. An oft quoted example in this respect is the hospital
cleaner who sees his or her job not as cleaning but helping to deliver high-quality
patient care. When conceptualised in this way, the cleaner’s job takes on a high level
of task significance.
Together, skill variety, task identity and task significance comprise the
‘meaningfulness’ of the work undertaken. Job design should aim to achieve all three
in order to promote motivation in workers and thus higher performance. Although
some organisations have worked to design jobs to achieve this, there are still many
contemporary organisations which adopt somewhat Taylorist principles. One only
has to think of the level of routine and specialisation in jobs such as call centre
operatives or fast food restaurant workers to see that the principles of the JCM are by
no means universally adopted. This may go some way to explaining the typically
high level of labour turnover in such organisations.
Autonomy
Autonomy describes the extent to which the individual undertaking the job has the
discretion to make decisions about how it is done, including scheduling the work
and deciding upon the procedures used to carry it out. Autonomy creates the
positive outcome of responsibility, which again influences motivation. The flattening
organisation structures discussed earlier in this chapter have led, since the
mid-1990s, to an organisational preoccupation with worker autonomy in the guise of
‘empowerment’ (see e.g. Cooney 2004). Empowerment devolves responsibility to
workers and removes the need for close supervision control − impossible given the
removal or reduction of middle managers in many organisations. Working time
flexibility, which we discuss below, can also create more worker autonomy (Hall and
Atkinson 2006). More recently, the concern to create worker autonomy has been
reflected in high-performance work organisation designs focusing on employee
involvement mechanisms, as discussed earlier.
Feedback
Feedback is about receiving direct and clear information about levels of
performance. This leads to worker knowledge which again, according to the JCM,
leads to higher motivation. Krasman (2013) presents an interesting study of feedback
in relation to the JCM and its positive outcomes. It is this need for feedback which
underpins many contemporary performance management systems (see Chapter 10).
The JCM led to a paradigm shift in which jobs were designed which required a range
of skills and abilities, provided greater freedom to workers, who often worked in
autonomous teams, and adopted flexible working practices. Its principles impacted
on models of the flexible firm in the 1980s, high-performance work systems in the
1990s and through to the organisational development approaches of this century.
Job design is, however, still dependent on individual characteristics; some workers
will, for example, be more receptive to being stretched and challenged than others.
Morgeson and Humphrey (2006) also argue that its effectiveness will depend on
organisational context, as we see in the Window on practice below which considers
role redesign for midwives in the NHS.
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