Summary Articles Work Organization and Job Design

WORK ORGANIZATION AND
JOB DESIGN
Summary Articles




Quirine Rodenberg

,Article – Morgeson: The Work Design Questionnaire
- Morgeson and Humphrey reviewed all existing measures of work design and concluded that
these had;
o A lack of comprehensiveness
 Important work characteristics were not covered
 Thing were to specific and too general
o Leads to measurements problems
o Poor psychometric quality and poor construct validity
 Poor reliability and does not measure what it is supposed to measure
o Theorizing in the area of work design has slowed dramatically
o Hard response scale with negatively worded items

- Research
o Students analysed the job of a family member
 Paper-and-pencil version of WDQ
 Interview about the job
 To find out more information about the job such as key tasks and
duties of the job
 Use all the gained information to compare it with the job codes
 Used the detailed information to find the correct job code
o Used several options for WDQ
 4,18,19,20,21-factor WDQ
 19  split interdependence
 20  split autonomy

- Morgeson and Humprey developed and validated a comprehensive work design
questionnaire  WDQ
o Measures 21 work characteristics grouped into four higher-order categories;
 Task characteristics
 Task variety
 Task significance
o Degree to which a job influences the lives or work of inside
and outside others
 Task identity
o Degree to which a job involves a whole piece of work
 Autonomy
o Work scheduling autonomy
o Decision making autonomy
o Work methods autonomy
 Feedback from job
 Knowledge characteristics
 Job complexity
 Information processing
 Problem solving
 Skill variety
 Specialization
 Social characteristics
 Social support
o Job provides opportunities for advice and assistance from
others

,  Such as a=supervisor and coworker social support
 Interdependence
o Initiated interdependence
 Refers to work flowing from one job to other jobs
o Received interdependence
 Refers to work being affected by work from others
 Interaction outside the organization
 Feedback from others
 Contextual characteristics
 Ergonomics
 Physical demands
 Work conditions
 Equipment use

- Conclusions on WDQ
o WDQ is a comprehensive instrument for the analysis and redesign of jobs and
workplaces to optimize jobs, tasks and workplaces according to organizational
behaviour criteria
 High internal consistency reliability of the WDQ scales
 Related meaningful to job-based databases
o Good work design can reduce burnout, diminish stress, foster health, improve
motivation and lead to enhanced satisfaction and performance
o The WDQ is not based on a specific work design theory but rather developed as an
attempt to summarize the work characteristics existing in literature so far
o The WDQ was developed;
 To provide practitioners with a larger range of options for diagnosing and
(re)designing jobs
 To foster research by providing researchers with a larger pool of potentially
relevant variables to include in their models

- Implications WDQ
o One of the challenges is the variety of changes that can be made to a job and exactly
what to change to achieve different redesign goals
o An issue concerns whether organizations actually use measures such as WDQ when
redesigning work
o One of the challenged associated with designing work is potential individual
differences in job incumbent attitudes and values and their responses to their
working environment