Job enrichment is defined as a way to motivate employees by giving them more responsibilities and variety in their jobs. It is the method of job design in which some higher order responsibilities are added to the job. This means, under this method, jobs are designed including task demanding higher-order skills, greater experience, and better expertise. Job enrichment makes the job more meaningful, enjoyable and satisfying. This method integrates the task or activities vertically. It gives the workers more autonomy for planning and controlling the job. Therefore, this method can also be said as a vertical expansion of the job. Especially, to those employees who desire opportunities for personal growth, jobs need to be designed with enrichment method. Enriched jobs motivate employees by adding challenging and interesting features to the job.
Job enrichment gives a lot of freedom to the employee but at the same time increases the responsibility. Enriched jobs provide not only the challenging jobs but greater authority to accomplish jobs. With such practices, an organization can prepare employees for the upper positions required to fulfill in the future. Such jobs reduce monotony among employees.
Merits of Job enrichment method:
- Employees with high ambition and seeking greater personal growth can be satisfied and motivated.
- This will be beneficial for succession planning.
- Absenteeism and turnover rate can be reduced.
- Productivity can be easily improved.
Demerits of Job Enrichment method:
- This method is not appropriate for the employees with low self-esteem, confidence and pessimistic employees.
- This method is not suitable for complex job consisting of many production processes.
- This is risky to assign higher order responsibilities to the employees without training.
- Employees may reject the additional responsibilities because of resistivity toward change.
- A manager may be unwilling to delegate authority with responsibilities which creates problems in decision making.
- Decision made by lower level employees under enrichment may be risky.
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