Interdisciplinary examination of the costs and benefits of enlarged jobs: A job design quasi-experiment.

Abstract

Costs and benefits of job enlargement were examined in an interdisciplinary framework (Campion, 1988,1989; Campion & Thayer, 1985). A quasi experiment was conducted with multiple comparison groups, dependent variables, and replications in a financial services organization. Enlargement involved combining jobs and adding ancillary duties to jobs. Dataonl 1 clerical jobs were collected from incumbents (n = 377), managers (n = 80), and analysts (n = 90). Enlarged jobs had better motivational design and worse mechanistic (i.e., engineering) design. They had the benefits of more employee satisfaction, less mental underload, greater chances of catching errors, and better customer service, but they also had the costs of higher training requirements, higher basic skills, and higher compensable factors. Biological (i.e., physical) aspects were unaffected. All potential costs of enlarged jobs were not always observed, suggesting that it may be possible to gain benefits through redesign without incurring every cost. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate one of the most popular job redesign interventions in the organizational behavior literature—job enlargement. This intervention is inspired by the psychology-based motivational models of job design (e.g., Hackman & Oldham, 1980; Herzberg, 1966). These models focus on such job attributes as variety, autonomy, and task significance. Evaluations of these interventions are usually concerned only with beneficial outcomes of such models (e.g., job satisfaction).