Stress and the Manager by KARL ALBRECHT & Maria Carella

Author:KARL ALBRECHT & Maria Carella
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 1979-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Re-evaluate and Redesign the Job When Necessary

Don’t assume that a job, once designed, will continue to provide a good combination of productivity and satisfaction indefinitely. Every job needs to be retested and re-evaluated from time to time and redesigned when circumstances call for it. As social values shift, as technology provides new alternatives, and as demands for the organization’s goods or services shift, some jobs must shift to enable the organization to adapt successfully. And as employee attitudes and values shift (which they seem to do from one generation to the next), jobs need to evolve in such a way as to provide the requisite rewards that will invite people to perform them well.

Obviously, designing a job from scratch presents a much greater challenge than evaluating an existing job and redesigning it. Except for the fact that tradition and the status quo can sometimes imprison our thinking about how jobs should be done, it is usually easier to start with something that exists rather than to dream up an entirely new design. On the other hand, since so many of the jobs in American business organizations seem to lack one or more of the important ingredients we’ve been studying, our first priority should be to evaluate existing jobs anyway. The potential for job enrichment as a means of improving American productivity and increasing the quality of working life is almost beyond comprehension.

Let’s take a brief look at a few typical jobs and apply this assessment approach (Albrecht, 1978). The job of manager, for example, should not be exempt from the application of these principles. Every manager should have a set of clear, understandable, worthwhile, and important objectives for his approach to the problem of running the organizational unit. The mundane objective may be “supervise the blood dialysis unit.” The creative objective may be a number of objectives, such as “provide important patient data to physicians,” “help my employees develop and advance themselves in their professions,” and “maintain good morale and job satisfaction under conditions of high pressure and fast pace.” The big difference between the manager’s job and the worker’s job, in terms of objectives, is that the manager must set most of the objectives. This is part of his job.

Job conditions for the manager are usually highly diversified and to some extent subject to his own making. He can usually establish working patterns that get the job done and provide opportunities for job satisfaction. More than any other kind of worker in the organization, the manager can act to influence his own circumstances and to maximize job satisfaction.

Another job that is coming more and more under scrutiny is that of secretary. As more and more educated women move into the work force and as government and private pressures increase toward developing equal employment opportunities, the traditional job of secretary has less and less appeal. Fewer women are satisfied to be placed in dead-end jobs that offer only modest incomes and no avenues for advancement and that often involve demeaning, stereotyped tasks and relationships with managers based on sex role.

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