Work design

Work design (also referred to as job design or task design) is an area of research and practice within industrial and organizational psychology, and is concerned with the "content and organization of one's work tasks, activities, relationships, and responsibilities" (p. 662). Research has demonstrated that work design has important implications for individual employees (e.g., employee engagement, job strain, risk of occupational injury), teams (e.g., how effectively groups co-ordinate their activities), organisations (e.g., productivity, occupational safety and health targets), and society (e.g., utilizing the skills of a population or promoting effective aging). The terms job design and work design are often used interchangeably in psychology and human resource management literature, and the distinction is not always well-defined. A job is typically defined as an aggregation of tasks assigned to individual. However, in addition to executing assigned technical tasks, people at work often engage in a variety of emergent, social, and self-initiated activities. Some researchers have argued that the term job design therefore excludes processes that are initiated by incumbents (e.g., proactivity, job crafting) as well as those that occur at the level of teams (e.g., autonomous work groups). The term work design has been increasingly used to capture this broader perspective. Additionally, deliberate interventions aimed at altering work design are sometimes referred to as work redesign. Such interventions can be initiated by the management of an organization (e.g., job rotation, job enlargement, job enrichment) or by individual workers (e.g., job crafting, role innovation, idiosyncratic deals). Interest in the question of what makes good work was largely initiated during the industrial revolution, when machine-operated work in large factories replaced smaller, craft-based industries. In 1776, Adam Smith popularized the concept of division of labor in his book The Wealth of Nations, which states that dividing production processes into different stages would enable workers to focus on specific tasks, increasing overall productivity.