Managing & Leading for High Performance :

Job Design and Goal Setting

Sanjeeva Perera
B.Sc. (Eng.) Hons , MBA (Col.)

(OB) (577)
MSc/PGD in Information Systems & Information Management
Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology
Environmental Context
 Information Tech & Globalization
 Diversity & Ethics

Organizational Context
 Design & Culture
 Reward System
Managing & Leading
Dynamics for High Performance

 Communication  Job Design & Goals

ORGANIZATIONAL  Decision Making  Behavioral

Social BEHAVIOR
Cognitive Management
 Stress & Conflict
Theory
 Leadership
 Power & Politics Processes

 Groups & Teams  Great Leaders

Cognitive Processes
 Perception & Attribution
 Personality & Attitudes
 Motivational needs & Processes
 Positive Psychological Capacities

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Managing & Leading for High
Performance :

Job Design and Goal Setting

Job Design and Goal Setting

 Discuss the background of job design as an approach to

managing for high performance
 Define the job enrichment and job characteristics
approaches to job design
 Present the quality of work life (QWL) and sociotechnical
approaches to job design
 Explain goal-setting theory and guidelines from research
 Describe the application of goal setting to overall systems
performance

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Managing Performance Through:

Job Design
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 A set of principles and practices designed to increase the
performance of individual workers by stressing job
simplification and job specialization.
 Job simplification: The breaking up of the work that
needs to be performed in an organization into the
smallest identifiable tasks.
 Job specialization: The assignment of workers to perform
small, simple tasks.
 Time and motion studies: Studies that reveal exactly how
long it takes to perform a task and the best way to
perform it.
 Job engineering comes from this perspective
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 Pay is the principal outcome used to motivate workers to
contribute their inputs.
 Piece-rate pay system

 Scientific management focuses exclusively on extrinsic

motivation and ignores the important role of intrinsic
motivation.
 Specific disadvantages:
 Workers may feel that they have lost control over their work
behaviors.
 Workers may feel as if they are part of a machine and are treated
as such.
 Workers have no opportunity to develop and acquire new skills.

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 Job Enlargement
 Broadening the scope of a job by expanding the number of
different tasks to be performed.
Video
 Job Enrichment
 Increasing the depth of a job by adding the responsibility
for planning, organizing , controlling, and evaluating the
job.
Video
 Job Rotation
 The process of shifting a person from job to job.

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(Continued)

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 Skill Variety
 The extent to which the work requires several
different activities for successful completion.
 Task Identity
 The extent to which the job includes a “whole”
identifiable unit of work that is carried out from
start to finish and that results in a visible outcome.
 Task Significance
 The impact the job has on other people.

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 Autonomy
 The extent of individual freedom and discretion in
the work and its scheduling.
 Feedback
 Amount of information employees receive about
how well or how poorly they have performed.

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MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES FOR AFFECTING…
 Skill Variety  Job Enlargement
 Task Identity  Broadening the scope of a job
 Task Significance by expanding the number of
 Autonomy
different tasks to be
performed.
 Feedback
 Job Enrichment
 Increasing the depth of a job
by adding the responsibility
for planning, organizing ,
controlling, and evaluating
the job.
 Job Rotation
 The process of shifting a
person from job to job.
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Change Made
Combine tasks so that a
worker is responsible for
doing a piece of work from
start to finish.
Group tasks into natural work
units so that workers are
responsible for an entire set
of important activities rather
than just a part of them.
Allow workers to interact with
customers or clients, and make
workers responsible for
managing these relationships
and satisfying customers.
Vertically load jobs so that
workers have more control
over their work activities and
higher levels of responsibility.
Open feedback channels
so that workers know how
they are performing their
jobs.
Job Dim Inc Example
Skill variety A production worker is responsible for
Task identity assembling a whole bicycle, not just attaching
Task significance the handlebars.
Task identity A computer programmer handles all
Task significance programming requests from one division
instead of one type of request from several
different divisions.
Skill variety A truck driver who delivers photocopiers not
only sets them up but also trains customers in
Autonomy
how to use them, handles customer billing, and
Feedback responds to customer complaints.
Autonomy A corporate marketing analyst not only prepares
marketing plans and reports but also decides when
to update and revise them, checks them for
errors, and presents them to upper management.
Feedback In addition to knowing how many claims he handles
per month, an insurance adjuster receives his clients’
responses to follow-up questionnaires that his
company uses to measure client satisfaction.
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 Realize that increasing subordinates’ intrinsic motivation decreases
your need to closely supervise subordinates and frees up your time
for other activities.
 To increase levels of intrinsic motivation and job satisfaction,
increase levels of the five core dimensions.
 Do not redesign jobs to increase levels of the five core dimensions if
workers do not desire personal growth and development at work.
 Before any redesign effort, make sure that workers are satisfied with
extrinsic job outcomes. If workers are not satisfied with these
factors, try to increase satisfaction levels prior to redesigning jobs.
 Make sure that workers have the necessary skills and abilities to
perform their jobs. Do not redesign jobs to increase levels of the
core dimensions for workers whose skills and abilities are already
stretched by their current jobs.
 Periodically assess workers’ perceptions of the core dimensions of
their jobs as well as their levels of job satisfaction and intrinsic
motivation.
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The Japanese Approach
 Emphasizes strategic level
 Encourages collective and cooperative
working arrangements
 Emphasizes lean
production

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 Using committed employees with ever-expanding
responsibilities to achieve zero waste, 100% good
product, delivered on time, every time

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The German Approach
 Technocentric - placing technology and engineering
at the center of job design decisions (traditional
German approach)
 Anthropocentric –
placing human
considerations at the
center of job design
decisions
(more recent German
approach)
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The Scandinavian
Approach
 encourages high degrees
of worker control
 encourages good social
support systems for
workers

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FLEXIBILITY

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 Peter Drucker
 The Practice of Management (1954)
 “It does not matter whether the workers
wants responsibility or not…The enterprise
must demand it of him.”

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 Safety Awards

 Question on Job Design?

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Managing Performance Through:

Goal Setting
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 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Stephen R Covey (2004)
 “#2 Begin with the End in Mind”
 The HP Way, David Packard (2005)
 “We thought if we could get everyone to agree on
what our objectives were and to understand what
we were trying to so, then we could turn them
loose and they would move in a common
direction.“
 This is Goal Setting
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• Goal: What an individual is trying to accomplish
through his or her behavior and actions.

• Goal Setting Theory: A theory that focuses on

identifying the types of goals that are most effective
in producing high levels of motivation and
performance and why goals have these effects.

• Goal setting can operate to enhance both intrinsic

motivation (in the absence of any extrinsic rewards)
and extrinsic motivation (when workers are given
extrinsic rewards for achieving their goals).
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 S – Specific
 M – Measurable
 A – Achievable
 R – Result – based
 T – Time specific

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 (Continued)

 Major Dimensions of Goal Setting

 Research on the Impact of Goal Setting
 The Importance of Specific Goals
 The Importance of Difficult and Challenging Goals
 Goal Acceptance, Participation, and Commitment
 Self-Efficacy and Goals
 Objective and Timely Feedback

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• Specificity
– Often quantitative
• Difficulty
– Should be hard but not impossible for most
workers to achieve
• Acceptability
– Especially important when managers set goals
for subordinates
• Feedback
– So that workers know how well they are doing

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 Directing workers’ attention and action
toward goal-relevant activities
 Causing workers to exert higher levels of
effort
 Causing workers to develop action plans to
achieve their goals
 Causing workers to persist in the face of
obstacles or difficulties

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 There are two circumstances under which
setting specific, difficult goals will not lead
to high motivation and performance:
 When workers lack the skills and abilities needed
to perform at a high level.
▪ (never forget: performance = ability * motivation * support)
 When workers are given complicated and
difficult tasks that require all of their attention
and require a considerable amount of learning.

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 A goal-setting process in which a manager meets
with his or her supervisor to set goals and
evaluate the extent to which previously set goals
have been achieved.
 Although less common, MBO can also be used as
a motivational tool for nonmanagers.
 Necessary characteristics for MBO success:
 Set goals should contribute to organizational
effectiveness.
 Goals should be specific and difficult.
 A certain amount of trust and rapport must exist
between managers and their supervisors.
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(Continued)

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1. Be sure that a worker’s goals are specific and
difficult, whether set by you, by the worker, or
by both of you.
2. Express confidence in your subordinates’
abilities to attain their goals, and give
subordinates regular feedback on the extent of
goal attainment.
3. When workers are performing difficult and
complex tasks that involve learning, do not set
goals until the workers gain some mastery over
the task.

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 Take a moment and think about something you want to
accomplish in the next 6 months. Can be personal, work,
school, whatever domain is salient. Make it YOUR goal,
something that REALLY matters to you.
 Write it down
 “Frame” it in the following ways:
 Reasonably difficult- some chance of failure
 Approach vs. avoidance (something to do; not something
to avoid)
 Clearly measurable
 Clearly noting what success looks like (specific, time
bound)
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 List 3-5 milestones or “sub-goals” that you will need to
accomplish along the way. Maybe draw it in a sequence if
you wish.

 Take a moment and think about what will prevent you from
accomplishing the goal. These are obstacles.
 Write down 3-5 of these obstacles.
 Write down what you will do to overcome the obstacles

 Write down who you can have hold you accountable and
share this plan with them.

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Questions

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