job Enrichment, and Enlargement

Job Enrichment vs. Job Enlargement

By Rom Antony Day

Second Edition Wednesday, January 09, 2008. First Edition 2007

This brief describes two concepts we often apply in

personnel management which you can use to attract and

retain first-class employees, particularly if they are

intrinsically motivated; this factor might be only

nice if when we are more extrinsically motivated.

Job enrichment in organizational development, human resources management, and organizational behavior, is the process of giving an employee more responsibility and increased decision-making authority (Motivation and Work Behavior; Fifth Edition by Richard M. Steers and Lyman W. Porter; 1991). This is the opposite of job enlargement, which does not give greater authority, just more duties. Job enlargement is often called "multi-tasking." This perhaps violates of one of the key principles of human achievement, namely, concentration of effort. One can perhaps manage and work on a variety of projects and still practice concentrated effort, but multitasking is so out of hand that it often prevents an employee from getting anything done.

The current practice of job enrichment stemmed from the work of Frederick Herzberg in the 1950s and 1960s. Herzberg's two factor theory argued that job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction are not to be seen as one dimension, but two. Aspects of work that contributed to job satisfaction are called motivators and aspects that contributed to job dissatisfaction are called hygiene factors; hence, the theory is also referred to as motivator-hygiene theory. Examples of motivators are recognition, achievement, and advancement. Examples of hygiene factors are salary, company policies and working conditions. According to Herzberg's theory, the existence of motivators would lead to job satisfaction, but the lack of motivators would not lead to job dissatisfaction, and similarly; hygiene factors affect job dissatisfaction, but not job satisfaction. In general, research has failed to confirm these central aspects of the theory. Hackman and Oldham later refined the work of Herzberg into the Job Characteristics Model which forms the basis of job enrichment today.