Job design: A social network perspective

摘要

A large part of many people's workday consists of interactions with others. Yet job design research has tended to neglect these network interactions as sources of attitudes and behaviors. Looking back at the history of job design research, we can trace how interest in social aspects of job design have Waned and waxed. In 1971, Haekman & Lawler published a precursor to the Hackman and Oldham (1975, 1976) Job Characteristics model. In addition to the core job dimensions of variety, autonomy, task identity, and feedback, Hackman and Lawler included two social dimensions: dealing with others and friendship opportunities. Prior to 1971, researchers from the Tavistock Institute endorsed aligning the social and the technical. Despite considerable research on "socio-technical systems" (Cooper & Foster, 1971; Herbst, 1962; Trist, Higgin, Murray, & Pollack, 1963), the social dimension of job design was excluded from what became the dominant job design model. Following Herzberg's (1966) emphasis on the motivational nature of the job itself, and debate concerning intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (e.g., Deci, 1971), Hackman and Oldham chose to focus exclusively on the individual in relation to his or her task. They dropped "dealing with others" and "friendship opportunities" and modified task feedback to only include feedback from doing the job itself (in additional to adding task significance and modifying variety to focus on a variety of skills).