Work design research and practice in the future - Parker, Wall, & Cordery - Article

Greater global competition, new forms of information and communication technology, increased service sector and more individualized career paths are changes in the organizational landscape which occur in these current times. By dealing with these changes contemporary and future jobs are designed to be flexible. In this article the key issues for these jobs are identified by designing an elaborated model of work design.

This model distinguishes five categories of variables:

• Antecedents: describe the factors that influence the choice of work design. These can be internal (management style, technology) or external to the organization (environment, political and labor institutions). Furthermore individual antecedents like personality, believes and trust are also influencing the choice of work design. Identifying these antecedents can be useful by predicting the types of work designs in various settings.

• Work characteristics: identifying what type of work has to be done. This is dependent on individual-level(job control, skill variety, feedback, emotional demands), group-level(team autonomy, team feedback, team skill variety) and interactions between work characteristics, which means that in some situations individual behavior or group process can be very different than you have predict.

• Outcomes: There is made a distinction between individual/group outcomes and organizational outcomes. Individual and group outcomes include job performance, affective reactions, safe working, outside-work activities and creativity. Organizational outcomes are related to productivity, customer satisfaction, absence, accidents and innovation.

• Mechanisms linking work characteristics to outcomes: Gives the mechanisms which are influencing the relationship between work characteristics and outcomes. The work design can affect the outcomes. Mechanisms as motivation, quick response, learning and development and interaction processes are all related to the final outcomes.

• Contingencies affecting the link between work characteristics and outcomes: there are some contingencies that affect the appropriateness and effectiveness of particular work designs. There are three types of contingencies; organizational contingencies, which stand for interdependence, uncertainty, implementation process, alignment or HR and technological systems.

• Second, the group contingencies are norms, knowledge, structure, size, skill composition, goal clarity. The last contingencies are the individual, which are growth need strength, ability, context satisfaction, interpersonal trust.