I/O Psychology Motivation

Episode 142: How To Make Jobs More Satisfying and Motivating

 

Do you have a dull job? Wonder how it can be made more motivating? That’s the challenge – how can we make jobs that are typically not much fun (like an assembly line job) more interesting to do? There is a lot of research on this important topic (check out The Five Drivers of Happiness at Work from the Wall Street Journal).

And Dan Pink wrote a good deal about this in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. This is one of the challenges facing I/O psychologists and in this episode I discuss the Job Characteristics theory by Hackman and Oldham and apply it to assembly line jobs in China where your iPhone is made and where a record number of suicides have occurred over the past few years. Can we use job redesign to make such jobs more tolerable?

5 Characteristics of Jobs that Affect Motivation

  • Significance: do the workers feel that the work they do every day is important in the grander scheme of things? To some workers it’s clear that their daily work is important (say, nurses), while others (say, assembly line workers who put together cell phone components) may not feel that their work is important. However, you can help cell phone assembly line workers get a connection to the significance of their work by reminding them of how important cell phones are to the global connections they enable between people and the role cell phones play (through photos and messaging) in changing the world. Here’s an article on the important role that leaders play in helping their employees find meaning in their work.
  • Identity: as opposed to putting one tiny piece onto something that other people put tiny pieces onto, it’s important for workers to be able to identify a whole task that they themselves created. Is there a way to redesign a job so that workers can put their names on something and say with pride, “I created that”?
  • Variety: nothing kills motivation faster than monotony. How can you increase the variety of things that workers do? How can you let them tap into their skills or build new skills so that work can include some variety from day to day?
  • Feedback: employees need to know how well they’re doing their jobs. This helps with imparting a sense of pride as well. Feedback can come from a car that rolls off the assembly line and works perfectly (low defects) or it can come from a boss who tells the worker how well he/she is doing.
  • Autonomy: many employees benefit from having some say in how things are done. What aspects of the job can be supervised or redesigned based on input from employees? What decisions can they make on their own?
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Michael

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3 Comments

  1. Avatar

    zak

    March 6, 2011

    Interesting…
    Now what about rock stars/movie stars…? Maybe dying of an overdose is some sort of suicide? Being a public person -a job characteristic?- creating a lot of pressure? I don’t know… maybe I’m reaching too much? or there is some similarities here? or maybe it’s a completely different problem?
    I’m just thinking out loud :-)))

    Keep the good work!

  2. Avatar

    Michael

    March 6, 2011

    Matt,

    Thanks for mentioning Ariely. I have Predictably Irrational on my bookshelf but I just haven’t started reading it yet. Gotta get to that. Thanks for the push. I know he has some good ideas.

  3. Avatar

    MatthewTA

    March 6, 2011

    I’ve enjoyed your podcast immensely, especially these I/O psych episodes which never seem to get the same interest in other psych podcasts.

    I wanted to recommend the work of Dan Ariely if you haven’t already encountered him (I did a google search of your domain and didn’t find ‘ariely’). He is a behavioral economist, and writes quite a bit about productivity, happiness, j0b satisfaction and meaning at work in his books ‘Predictably Irrational’ and ‘The Upside of Irrationality’.

    Again, thanks for your podcast and keep up the good work.

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