Job enrichment is a useful technique for motivating the employees. It is also beneficial for the organization because it provides increased output and also a high level of satisfaction among the workers. The benefits of job enrichment are

(i) In the routine jobs, the employees find their jobs very boring and monotonous. The number of such employees is generally considerable. The frustration of these employees can be removed by making the job interesting with the job enrichment.

(ii) Job enrichment helps in reducing the races of employee’s turnover and absenteeism.

(iii) Job enrichment motivates the employees intrinsically by giving them opportunities for growth advancement and self realization.

(iv.) Task enforcement is made easy with the help of job enrichment and the skills of workers are increased.

(v) The enriched jobs give more job satisfaction to the employees.

(vi.) Job enrichment is advantageous to the organization as there is qualitative as well as quantitative improvement in output and there is higher satisfaction of the workers.

(vii) Employees tend to be more creative when they work in an enriching context of complex and challenging jobs.

Job enrichment means, adding a few more motivators to a job to make it more rewarding. A job is enriched when the nature of the job is made more exciting, challenging and creative or gives the job holder more decision making, planning and controlling powers.

According to Beatty and Schneider, “Job enrichment is a motivational technique which emphasis the need for challenging and interesting work.” It suggests that jobs should be redesigned so that intrinsic satisfaction can be derived from doing the job. In its best applications, it leads to a vertically enhanced job by adding functions from other organizational levels, making it contain more variety and challenging and offer autonomy and pride of the employees.

Job enrichment is thus, an important practice in meeting “whole man” needs. It represents a new and popular non-monetary motivational technique. It applies to improvement of job in such a way that it has more motivators than before and at the same time maintaining the degree of maintenance factors.

According to Herzberg, enriched job has eight characteristics. These characteristics are as explained below
1. Direct Feed Back: There should be a direct feed back of the employee’s performance. Employees should be able to get immediate knowledge of the results they are achieving. The job evaluation can be inbuilt in the job or provided by a supervisor.

2. Client Relationship: When an employee serves a client or customer directly, he has an enriched job. The client can be outside the organization or inside.

3. New Learning: An enriched job allows the employees to learn more. He should feel that he is growing mentally, an employee, who is doing some intellectual work, is having an enriched job.

4. Scheduling Own Work: Freedom to schedule one’s own work contributes to enrichment. Deciding when to tackle assignment is an example of self scheduling. Employees who perform creative work have more opportunity to schedule their assignment as compared to employees performing routine jobs.

5. Unique Experience: An enriched job has some unique qualities or features as compared to the other jobs.

6. Control over Resources: One approach to job enrichment is that each employee should have control over his own resources and expenses.

7. Direct Communication Authority: An employee holding the enriched job will be allowed to communicate directly with people who use his output.

8. Personal Accountability: An enriched job holds the incumbent responsible for the results. He receives praise for good work and blame for poor work. From the above features of job enrichment we conclude than the management should allow sufficient freedom to employees regarding the methods, sequence, pace etc of the work.

Research has concluded that there is a relationship between job satisfaction and performance of the employees. Thus, job satisfaction or job dissatisfaction is an important concern of the management. High job satisfaction may lead to improved productivity, decreased turnover, and improved attendance, reduced accidents, less job stress and less unionization. Job dissatisfaction produces low morale among workers and low morale at work is highly undesirable. In examining the outcomes of job satisfaction, it is important to break down the analysis into a series of specific subtopics. The following subtopics explain the outcomes of job satisfaction:

1. Job Satisfaction and Productivity: Is there any positive relationship between satisfaction and productivity? This controversy has been there over a number of years. Although, majority of people believe that there is a positive relationship, but research evidence concludes that there is not strong relationship between these two. According to the research findings of VROOM conducted in 1964, the medium correlation between satisfaction and performance is only 0.14. LAWLER and PORTER found that there is more evidence to suggest that job performance leads to job satisfaction and not the other way round. An employee who is a poor performer will get fewer rewards and will be less satisfied with his job experience.

However, the sayings that “A happy worker is a productive worker” are not always wrong. If people receive rewards which have both intrinsic and extrinsic value and they feel that there rewards are equitable, they will be satisfied and this will lead to greater job performance.

Moreover, research also includes that job satisfaction may not necessarily lead to improvement of individual performance but it does lead to departmental and organizational level improvement.

2. Job Satisfaction and Employee Turnover: Unlike the relationship between satisfaction and performance, research has concluded a moderate relationship between job satisfaction and turnover. High employee turnover is a matter of concern for the management as it disrupt the normal operations and continuous replacement of employees who leave the organization is costly and technically undesirable. Managerial concern is mostly for the turnover which arises because of job dissatisfaction. The employees, thus, tries to keep the employees satisfied on their jobs to minimize the turnover. Though, high job satisfaction in itself cannot keep the turnover low but considerable job dissatisfaction will definitely increase the employee turnover.

The employee turnover is affected by certain other factors also, in addition to job satisfaction. Commitment to the organization is one such factor some employees, however dissatisfied they arc with their jobs, they cannot imagine themselves working anywhere else. Another important factor is the better opportunities of employment. Even if the people arc highly satisfied with their jobs, they arc willing to leave if there are better opportunities available anywhere else. If no other opportunities are available, the employees will stay where they arc, irrespective of dissatisfaction.

On the overall basis, we can say that there is an important role played by job satisfaction in employee turnover.

3. Job Satisfaction and Absenteeism: It has been conclusively proved that there is an inverse relationship between job satisfaction and absenteeism. When satisfaction is high, absenteeism is low and when satisfaction is low, absenteeism is high. Less satisfied employees are more likely to be absent from work due to avoidable reasons. This is known as voluntary absenteeism as against unavoidable absenteeism which is due to illness or other emergency reasons. Management must be concerned with voluntary absenteeism, because it is related to job satisfaction. Absenteeism can be modified by certain factors. Research has found that people who believe that their work is important have lower absenteeism as compared to those who do not feel that way. Moreover, it is important to remember that while high job satisfaction will not necessarily result in low absenteeism (because of unavoidable absenteeism), but low job satisfaction will definitely bring about high absenteeism.

4. Job Satisfaction and Union Activities: It has been proved that satisfied employees are generally not interested in unions and they do not perceive them as necessary. Job satisfaction has proved to be the major cause of unionization. The employees join the unions because they feel that individually they are unable to influence changes which would eliminate the causes of job dissatisfaction. The level of union activities is related to the level of job dissatisfaction. Low level of dissatisfaction results in only grievances while higher levels of dissatisfaction will result in employee strikes.

5. Job Satisfaction and Safety: When people are dissatisfied with their jobs, company and supervisors, they are more prone to experience accidents. An underlying reason for this is that dissatisfaction lakes one’s attention away from the task at hand and leads directly to accidents. A satisfied worker will always be careful and attentive towards his job, and the chances of accidents will be less. Here, we are discussing about the avoidable accidents and not the unavoidable ones.

6. Other effects of Job Satisfaction: In addition, there are a number of other effects brought about by high job satisfaction. Highly satisfied employees tend to have better physical and mental health, learn the new job related tasks easily, and have less job stress and unrest. Such employees will become more co¬operative such as helping coworkers, helping customers etc. Such behavior will improve unit performance and organizational effectiveness.

To conclude, we can say that job satisfaction results from the employee’s perception that the job content and context actually provide what an employee values in the work situation. Organizationally speaking, high level of job satisfaction reflects a highly favorable organizational climate resulting in attracting and retaining better workers.

Job satisfaction is an important technique that is used to motivate the employees. As most of the people spend a major part of their life at the work place, job satisfaction is very important in creating happy employees and happy human beings. An employee who is satisfied also has better physical and mental health. Though job satisfaction cannot be seen it can be inferred as it relates to the feelings of the workers towards their jobs. It is generally determined by how the outcome will meet the expectations or exceed them. The employees who feel that they have to work harder than the other employees or that they are receiving lesser rewards may feel dissatisfied and a negative attitude towards their jobs, their boss and co-workers may creep in. On the contrary the workers who feel that they are paid equitably and treated fairly by their organization feel satisfied with their job and also have a positive attitude towards their jobs. Sometimes the terms job satisfaction and job attitudes are used interchangeably as a positive attitude towards the job is in concept equal to job satisfaction and a negative attitude towards the job can indicate dissatisfaction with the job. Even though the two terms are used interchangeably, there is difference between the two. Job satisfaction is a sub-set of attitude which reflects the feelings of the workers towards the individuals and the organizations. While attitude refers to up predisposition to respond the job satisfaction relates to the performance factors. Similarly attitudes are long lasting but job satisfaction is dynamic and keeps on changing. It can decline very rapidly hence the managers are required to keep an eye on the level of job satisfaction among the employees.

MBO is an effective motivational technique which is commonly used by managers and organizations. To attain maximum benefit from MBO the following steps could be helpful:

1. Support and commitment from top level management: It is essential that MBO should have the support and commitment of the top management without this support, MBO can never be a success. The superior must be willing to relinquish and share the authority with the subordinates. They should consider the subordinates as part of the team for decision making.

2. Clear Goal and objectives: The objectives should be clearly formulated must be realistic and achievable. They should be clearly understood by all concerned. The targets should neither be very high nor very low.

3. Participation of subordinates in Goal Setting: The objectives and goals should be set with the active participation of the subordinates. There should be effective two way communication between the superior and the subordinates for setting the goals, and for discussing their problems. These objectives must be properly communicated and clearly understood and accepted by all. MBO works best when the goals are willingly accepted.

4. Overall Philosophy of Management: MBO should be treated as an overall philosophy of management and the entire organizations. It should not be simply performance appraisal technique or a divisional process. It should change and replace all the old systems rather than just being added to them.

5. Delegation: MBO will not be effective if the manager is not willing to delegate sufficient authority to the subordinates. The subordinates who have been given challenging assignments through discussion with the superior must be given adequate authority to accomplish their goals otherwise they will not be willing to accept new assignments and they will resist the setting of clearly defined goals.

6. Revision and Modification Goals: The goals must be continuously reviewed and modified as the changed conditions require avoiding inflexibility. The review technique should be such that all deviations are caught early and corrected.

7. Orientation and Training of executives: As the philosophy of MBO is to be implemented by the executives, they must be given format training in understanding the basis as well as the contents of the program. They must be adequately oriented about the value of MBO. They should be trained in how to set the goals, the method and tools to achieve these goals, methods of reviews and evaluation of performance and provision to include and feed back that may be given.

Integration of MBO Program: MBO cannot be implemented as an isolated program. It should be accepted as a style of managing and should be synthesized with the organizational climate. All personal involved should have a clear understanding of their role, authority and their expectations. The system should be absorbed wholly by all departments and members of the organization.