What are the four major approaches to job design?

Different textbooks are inevitably going to
suggest different ways of sorting out job design, and the above categorization is certainly one
way, but there are others.  Another way of approaching this is with the following four
classifications:

Job Rotation: Designing a job with job rotation means
building in a variety of tasks for all employees, thus eliminating boredom on the job, expanding
the employee's areas of competence, and providing more flexibility in staffing and work flow. 
However, the drawbacks to this are that one cannot always realize economies of scale and
employees who have difficulty multi-tasking might find jobs like this difficult or frustrating. 
There are work settings where this is a good idea, for example, in a medical office in which
front office employees have a variety of responsibilities, but there are work settings where
this is a bad idea, for example, on an assembly line.

Job Engineering: This
method of job design focuses on the tasks to be done, the time involved in doing the tasks, and
the efficiency of product or service flow through the process.  There is no attention paid to
employees' job satisfaction or lack thereof in this design process, but in a highly mechanized
environment, there is usually a need for job engineering design.  It would be difficult, for
example, to put together a machine or a vehicle without attending to these priorities.

Job Enlargement: This kind of job design returns again to the principles of job
motivation and satisfaction, building in a natural progression for employees to take on
additional tasks that are a logical extension of what they already do.  This could just as
easily be called job expansion.  The idea is to begin employees with one task and once they have
achieved mastery, they can add an additional task that is in keeping with the first task.  So,
an employee might handle only the simplest sort of customer service calls and then expand to
more complex ones as time goes on.  This is motivating, since, if Theory Y holds true, which I
believe it does, we gain internal satisfaction from acquiring new skills.  We like to
learn! 

Job Enrichment: Once again, this is a means of designing jobs to
motivate employees, also based on Theory Y principles.  This is similar to job enlargement in
that the employee gets to do more tasks, but the focus is more on autonomy and responsibility in
the tasks that are part of the enrichment.  An employee might begin with responsibility to sell
a product, and then be given the responsibility to service the accounts for that product, and
ultimately be given his or her own budget and control over his or her scheduling to do so. 
Autonomy is one of the most powerful motivators in job satisfaction, so this is a highly
successful way of designing the work environment. 

I do want to emphasize
that a particular text on human resources or on management could very well divide job design
into four entirely different categories, but this is a good approach to consider, providing
choices for the mechanized environment or for employee motivation and satisfaction.  A good job
designer will bear in mind all the important attributes of each, to maximize job performance and
efficiency. 

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