77: Job Design - Hackman & Oldham - Talking About Organizations Podcast

With Special Guest Lisa Cohen

In 1975, J. Richard Hackman and Greg R. Oldham published a short article in the Journal of Applied Psychology presenting and defending their new instrument, the Job Diagnostic Survey, or JDS. The purpose of the instrument was to help managers enrich jobs and thus enhance employee motivation, performance, and satisfaction. It was based on research of various types of jobs across sectors and geographical contexts thus representing a form of ‘lowest common denominator’ of what makes for a good job.

The model features five “core” job dimensions: skill variety, task variety, task significant, levels of autonomy, and levels of feedback. Scores for each dimension add up to a “Motivating Potential Score” for a job. But ‘higher’ is not necessarily better, according to the authors. Greater skill variety, task variety, and so on may not be appealing to all workers such as potential inefficiency of having to constantly switch one’s frame from one type of activity to another. Consequently, Hackman & Oldham also identify an important additional component they called growth need strength – the extent to which a specific individual considers greater variety or autonomy desirable and motivating.

As we discuss in this episode, Hackman & Oldham’s JDS has become a foundational tool for many instruments and processes of job design and also a tacit assumption in personnel management and organization design conversations. Yet it is based on ideas about jobs as atomized and disembodied, as if they exist in and of themselves, echoing ideas from scientific management.

Yet as work becomes more interdependent and less routinized, a new paradigm is needed. One which attends both to their actual doing and the context in which jobs are meshed in. As our guest, Lisa Cohen, puts it in her work: we need to think of job system when we think about job design. Throughout the episode, we explore industry after industry and context after context how the ideas behind the JDS measure up and how we can thinking of jobs though an organizational lens can help design jobs better and thus design better jobs.

Part 1. The job diagnostic survey and its impacts in personnel management and organization theory

Part 2. From individualized job design to a job system model for the work challenges of the 21st century

Read with us:

Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1975). Development of the job diagnostic survey. Journal of Applied Psychology, 60(2), 159-170.

To Learn More:

Cohen, L. E. (2013). Assembling jobs: A model of how tasks are bundled into and across jobs. Organization Science, 24(2), 432-454.

Cohen, L. E. (2016). Jobs as Gordian knots: A new perspective linking individuals, tasks, organizations, and institutions. In The structuring of work in organizations. Emerald Group Publishing Limited.