What is Job Enrichment?

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.