Job Characteristics Model: A Practical Guide
Job characteristics have a significant impact on job satisfaction. And HR professionals have the power to shape these job characteristics in a way that both aligns with organizational goals and meets the intrinsic needs of employees.
The job characteristics model helps make the jobs at your organization more varied, challenging, and motivating. An engaged workforce is happier and more productive, but keeping employees happy and engaged is something that HR practitioners and managers struggle with. This is where the job characteristics model comes in. What exactly is this model, and how do you bring the theory into practice at your organization?
Contents
What is the job characteristics model?
5 core job characteristics in the job characteristics model explained
What is the goal of the job characteristics model?
Psychological states and work outcomes
Job characteristics model examples
FAQ
What is the job characteristics model?
The Job Characteristics Model (JCM) is a framework designed to enhance employee job satisfaction and performance by focusing on effective job design. It identifies five core job characteristics that, when present, can improve employee motivation, performance, and satisfaction, and lower absenteeism and turnover.
The five job characteristics are:
- Skill variety: The extent to which a job requires a variety of different activities using specialized skills or talents
- Task identity: The degree to which a job requires the completion of a whole and identifiable piece of work and how it fits into the broader organizational context
- Task significance: The extent to which a job has a meaningful impact on the lives or work of other people
- Autonomy: The level of freedom, independence, and discretion an employee has in scheduling the work and determining the procedures to be used in carrying it out
- Feedback: The clarity and directness of information the employee receives about their job performance.
Each one of these five components can be adjusted to recalibrate a job, making it more engaging for the employee. High individual job performance ultimately leads to improved business outcomes.
The job characteristics model emerged in 1975 when organizational psychologists Greg R. Oldham and J. Richard Hackman wanted to figure out why employees lost interest in their jobs. They studied people and their jobs and came up with a universal model that is still relevant more than 40 years later.
5 core job characteristics of the job characteristics model explained
Let’s dive deeper into the five core job characteristics identified in Oldman and Hackman’s job characteristics theory and model:
Skill variety This is the amount of variety in any one job. A grocery store cashier may have a job with little variety–they scan groceries and deal with customer inquiries all day. The store manager, on the other hand, needs to apply a variety of skills to carry out their daily tasks. They may handle customer complaints, create employee schedules, order products, train new managers, and numerous other tasks. Task identity Is there a beginning, middle, and end to a task? Can an employee tell where one task ends and another begins? Project-based jobs have high levels of task identity. How much of one task does any individual employee accomplish? For instance, if a designer designs an entire room, that has a higher task identity than just designing the window treatments. Task significance What type of impact does this task have on the entire company or the customers? Jobs with higher task impact tend to have a broader reach. For example, a chief marketing officer’s work affects the whole company and has high task significance. Autonomy How much independence does this job have? Does a manager oversee every tiny thing, or is the employee trusted to accomplish the task? Higher task autonomy brings a feeling of ownership and responsibility. Lower levels of autonomy lead to feeling micromanaged and stifled. Feedback How much does an employee know about their own performance? Feedback can come from traditional channels, such as manager feedback and customer satisfaction surveys. Or, feedback can come as a natural result of the work. If a janitor’s job is to clean the bathrooms, they can take a look at the bathroom and see how effective they are at their job. On the other hand, someone who works on a manufacturing line may not know how effective they were at their job until the quality assurance people step in and check the work.
Let’s have a look at how these core job characteristics translate into actual jobs:
Primary school teacher
- Skill variety. High. A primary school teacher works with multiple children and applies a multitude of skills on a daily basis. Every day, there is a new challenge.
- Task identity. This can depend on the school and the assignment. Each unit can have a beginning, middle, and end so that a teacher can see clear progress.
- Task significance. While many would argue that a primary school teacher has incredibly high task significance, their impact may be limited to one class. In contrast, a school principal oversees many teachers, students, and grades and has a higher task significance.
- Autonomy. A teacher who designs their curriculum has a high degree of autonomy. A teacher who must teach a pre-planned curriculum on a school administration schedule, using only rewards and punishments approved by the school board, will have a lower degree of autonomy.
- Feedback. The primary school teacher receives feedback from a variety of sources. They can see the test scores and the progress their students make. They also receive information from their supervisors and parents. All these things work together to provide a high degree of feedback.
Fast food worker
- Skill variety. If the employee runs a cash register, takes orders, makes sandwiches, helps with inventory, and trains new hires, this job has a high degree of skill variety. If, on the other hand, they stand at the sandwich-making station all day, it would be a low level of skill variety.
- Task identity. This would vary greatly depending on the skill variety. Someone who spends the entire day in one station could have a beginning, middle, and an end but not feel responsible for the whole process.
- Task significance. The typical fast-food worker makes very few decisions outside of a small set of tasks–should I make the sandwich first or fill the drink cup? These tasks have a low level of significance, as they do not affect the company as a whole.
- Autonomy. With low variety, task identity, and task significance, this job also comes with low autonomy. The fast-food worker makes sandwiches according to a chart on the wall and fries french fries by pushing a pre-programmed button.
- Feedback. The fast-food worker receives feedback based on immediate responses from customers and coworkers. Managers also provide feedback.
HR Generalist
- Skill variety. The HR generalist scores very high in skill variety, as they are responsible for employee relations, benefits management, employee compensation, and many other tasks daily, having to use multiple skills.
- Task identity. While there is a strong identity associated with the title, there is very rarely a beginning, middle, and end. An HR generalist can never say, “all employees are engaged and happy, so I’m done with employee engagement tasks.”
- Task significance. A good HR generalist can help make a company run smoothly. They can coach managers to be better, provide accurate information to the government, and help employees navigate difficult situations at work. A bad one can destroy the morale of the company. Therefore, task significance is high.
- Autonomy. This can vary greatly. An HR generalist who runs their department and reports to a supportive company president can have a high independence level. A company that limits the HR generalist’s work and undermines their suggestions can create a job with low autonomy.
- Feedback. Feedback for an HR generalist can be difficult. Some successes or failures aren’t seen for years, if ever. What’s more, a non-HR supervisor may not understand what they accomplished and give limited feedback. As a result, this can be a difficult job for accurate feedback.
What is the goal of the job characteristics model?
Oldham and Hackman were looking to reduce the boredom and monotony that comes from working in a factory setting. Instead of getting better and more productive as time passed, they found that employees were becoming bored and unengaged, and their performance dropped. This model helps turn jobs around.
The job characteristics model can help an HR professional evaluate a job and make it better and more engaging. Managers can work with their employees to create a better situation for everyone–ultimately increasing engagement and productivity.
Sometimes, jobs just “happen.” There is a lot of work to be done, so companies hire a new person but fail to conduct a job analysis and create a position without a proper job design process. Using Hackman and Oldham’s job characteristics model, you can sit down and design a job to be more effective.
Here are some of the ways that the job characteristics model can help organizations:
It helps in creating job design strategies.
Unless your business consists of one solo practitioner, you have multiple people in multiple roles. Tasks assigned to each job can vary from position to position. With the job characteristics model, you look at all the functions and build various jobs around them.
For instance, you can bring in job rotation, which allows a bit of variety in everyone’s day. Or, you can work to simplify some tasks–especially ones that are tedious. You’ll have some areas you will want to expand and make more critical, and you’ll figure out where you need to include employee enrichment.
The job characteristics model recognizes that it’s not just about working today, but developing jobs for the future, so employee enrichment is a critical part of this model.
It improves job satisfaction.
When Human Resources and management work together with the job characteristics model, they design each job to increase job satisfaction. While it’s impossible to do away with all boring or monotonous tasks, this model can reduce those problems.
For example, your busy law firm may have enough work for one person to spend all day filing–a tedious and boring job. You might break that task up so that four people spend two hours per day filing and the other six doing more exciting tasks. The result is higher job satisfaction and better performance.
It enables job enrichment.
This step focuses on taking a regular job and adding additional tasks and assignments to make it a better job. Instead of focusing on making things as easy as possible, job enrichment makes it more motivating. Job enrichment can give purpose to the job. While the job characteristics model comes from the 1970s, it is still very timely. Younger workers place a high value on meaningful work, and job enrichment can do just that.
Better delegation of tasks.
The job characteristics model uses job design to make jobs better. Jobs are broken down into specific tasks, and employees receive authority to carry those tasks out. This autonomy gives employees more control over their work environment and increases their job satisfaction.
Clear organizational information.
When everyone’s job description is a result of thorough job analysis with clear tasks and responsibilities, it is easier to manage the organization. You can see who is responsible for which duties. It can make general organizational design easier.
It allows for straightforward performance appraisals and goal setting.
Because each job is designed rather than thrown together, setting goals and evaluating employee performance becomes more manageable in an organization that follows the job characteristics model.
Psychological states and work outcomes
The original development of the job characteristics model searched for how to make jobs better so that employees can be happier and more productive at work. This model can help by affecting the employees’ psychological states. These include:
- Experienced meaningfulness. When an employee feels that they accomplish something of value, meaningfulness is the result.
- Experienced responsibility for outcomes. Using the job characteristics model and giving employees autonomy over their tasks, they can feel responsible for their work. If they accomplish the work successfully, that’s a positive psychological outcome.
- Knowledge of the actual results. In larger companies or siloed organizations, employees often find it difficult to see the consequences of their actions. With good task identity and feedback, an employee can see their impact on the bigger organization.
The updated model defines the following work outcomes:
- Internal work motivation. Employees whose jobs have been optimized under the job characteristics model feel responsible for their work and find it more meaningful. Therefore, their internal motivation increases.
- Job satisfaction. Job satisfaction increases when employees experience autonomy, receive meaningful and timely performance, and feel their work is significant. This, in turn, leads to performance.
- Work performance. This was a key driver in developing the job characteristics model. The organizational psychologists wanted to increase performance through the careful use of these tools. Evaluating and optimizing jobs for each category improves performance.
- Low absenteeism rate and turnover. Happy and engaged employees are more likely to come to work and less likely to quit.
- Quality and quantity of work. When applied effectively, this model can increase both the quality and quantity of work and employee satisfaction. It brings out the best results for employees and managers alike.
Job characteristics model examples
Reading about the job characteristics model, you can see its benefits quite clearly. However, it may feel overwhelming to redesign the roles in the entire company based on this model. You do not need to do everything at once–you can start with one job at a time.
Let’s take a look at some examples of how to put the job characteristics model into practice.
1. Primary school teacher
For the primary school teacher, you can increase task identity by dividing the work among several teachers. By having one teacher teach all the second-grade students math while another tackles physical education, they can develop a deeper connection and expertise in their designated area, which not only improves their sense of identity with the tasks but also increases their autonomy.
Furthermore, this specialization can lead to a greater sense of accomplishment and recognition as they see the direct impact of their efforts on student learning and development over the course of the year. That means they have feedback on their work.
2. Fast food worker
For a fast-food worker, you can increase variety by having employees learn each station and rotate through. So, someone may run a cash register on Monday, make sandwiches on Tuesday, and be in charge of the drive-through on Wednesday. This not only prevents the monotony associated with performing repetitive tasks but also increases their understanding of how each station contributes to the overall customer experience.
The variety fosters a more engaging and dynamic work environment, which can boost morale and team cohesion as employees gain an appreciation for their colleagues’ roles and challenges.
3. HR generalist
The HR generalist can have an enriched job when management trusts them to decide how to approach their job. Allowing them the autonomy to make decisions on how best to carry out their responsibilities can lead to more innovative and effective HR practices.
When HR generalists are entrusted with more control over their tasks, from recruitment strategies to employee development programs, they can tailor their approach to meet the unique needs of the organization and its workforce. This autonomy, coupled with the responsibility for significant areas within the organization, enhances their sense of significance and identity within their role.
Furthermore, it provides them with direct feedback on their initiatives’ effectiveness, creating a cycle of continuous improvement and professional growth.
For instance, by pulling from the job characteristics model examples above, you can see how to maximize the model.
There are many different ways to enrich a job. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Are there tasks that can be combined to give variety?
- Are there tasks that can be separated and divided among employees to increase variety?
- Is a siloed function working (everyone on this team makes hamburgers), or would it increase variety, autonomy, and task significance if you had everyone responsible for creating a customer’s entire meal?
- Is there an opportunity for growth? Are the skills the employee develops with this job applicable to higher-level positions? If not, what tasks can you add to increase these skills?
- Are you providing proper feedback? Is natural feedback occurring? Allowing employees to see how their work fits into the larger picture can increase the feedback organically.
A final word
The job characteristics model is a practical tool to analyze your organization’s jobs, which helps you improve your jobs, ultimately leading to increased motivation, satisfaction, and performance. It can be a great way to start revising job designs to better align with employee needs and organizational goals.
If you want to future-proof your HR skill set and develop new HR competencies, check out our All You Can Learn Certification Program!
FAQ
The five core job characteristics are:
– Skill variety: The variety of skills required in one job
– Task identity: The ability to clearly see the beginning, middle, and end of a task
– Task significance: Understanding the impact this task has on the wider company or its customers
– Autonomy: The level of independence a job has
– Feedback: Feedback on an employee’s performance so they can see how effective they are at various aspects of their job
Oldham and Hackman’s primary goal in developing the job characteristics model was to determine why employees eventually lost interest in their jobs. HR can use the model to evaluate a job, make it more effective and engaging, and keep employees happier and more productive at work.
The three critical psychological states in the job characteristics model are:
– Experienced meaningfulness: This occurs when an employee believes they have accomplished something worthwhile.
– Experienced responsibility for outcomes: When employees have autonomy over their tasks, they feel responsible for their work and the outcome.
– Knowledge of the actual results: In larger organizations, it’s challenging for employees to see the consequences of their actions, but good task identity and feedback can help employees see their individual impact on the wider organization.
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