Work Design & Task Identity

Harvard Business Review just published their list of "Breakthrough Ideas for 2010." Since the new social-mobile information technologies hold the potential to restructure much of the work we do, I found the first "breakthrough idea" especially interesting: the single most important factor in great workday was a feeling that the worker had made progress.

One implication is that work should be structured so that everyone perceives clear progress each day. Among other things, this has a tie to Klein's Data-Frame model...work that is perceived as rewarding may be as much or more about how it's framed as it is about what is actually accomplished. Naturally, there are limits...a pig with lipstick is still a pig.

Anyway, this reminded me of one of the texts from my master's program...Hackman & Oldham's "Work Redesign" (kind of strange coincidence..tonight I was watching "This Emotional Life" on PBS and Hackman was one of the people interviewed). In this book, they propose a model of the properties that make a job rewarding. This model consists of 5 Core Job Characteristics that lead to 3 Psychological States necessary for high internal motivation. If you've not seen such a model before, you might find the 5 characteristics interesting:

• Skill variety - degree to which a job requires a variety of different activities, involving different skills and talents
• Task identity - degree to which a job requires completion of a "whole" and identifiable piece of work
• Task significance - degree to which a job has a substantial impact on the lives of other people (e.g., a fireman)
• Autonomy - degree to which a job provides substantial freedom, independence, and discretion to the individual in scheduling and carrying out the work
• Job feedback - degree to which the work activities provide direct and clear information about the worker's performance

Task identity is basically the "progress" component of a job.

I don't do this sort of work, nor have I ever used this model in any kind of analysis. And, the book dates from an era that was focused on enriching jobs (with some justification...though the enrichment in the West seems to have been much cruder and more superficial (at least in manufacturing), than in Eastern companies like Toyota), and was characterized by "expert" consultants who would come in and "fix" things.

Bottom line: even though much of Hackman & Oldham's analysis seems grounded in the older control of function & control of information paradigms, the factors they identify seem as relevant as ever...especially since we seem to be moving toward an era where knowledge workers will have an increasing amount of say in how work is organized and framed.