Introduction:
Solange De Santis joined a General Motors van assembly plant in 1991. During her eighteen months at GM she suffered from boredom, strain, psychological distress, job dissatisfaction, a feeling of distrust and a lack of job security. All of these factors had a detrimental effect on her health, safety and productivity.
What job re-design opportunities are available to foster a healthier and more productive workplace? In order to answer this question we adopt job and work design theory that will analyze her role and provide tangible solutions. The following three ¡®Job Design Approaches¡¯ will be explored: 1) Job rotation 2) Job enrichment 3) Teamworking.
The article outlined below elaborates on three small psychological changes to make working conditions for De Santis much better, improving her job safety and productivity. We hope that¡±Little changes make a big difference in the long term.¡±(Julian Barling, Topic 9, slide 3)
Job Rotation:
De Santis is an autoworker on the van assembly line at the General Motors plant. She performs the same simple task, and repeats the same procedures everyday. There are no opportunities for her to learn new skills or face any new challenges. It is easy to imagine how boring and frustrated anyone in her position would become. In addition to the challenge of her routine she also works on high stress and overload because of the non-stop, always catching up nature of the assembly line. According to research, boredom can cause daydreams and strain which together can threaten her safety. These negative experiences impact her job satisfaction and motivation.
What we should do is reduce boredom, strain and dissatisfaction. Through job rotation it is possible to re-design her job and make it much more interesting and fun which should reduce her current levels of boredom and stress. How is this possible? Job rotation can reduce De Santis¡¯s boredom, relieve her from repetitive movements, and increase motivation by diversifying her experience; job rotation provides the kind of flexibility and experience that will allow her to feel much more control of her work and develop important skills that can help to off-set feelings of uncertainty; job rotation also helps to improve morale, increases ownership and should enable her to reach her potential; it is also shown to lower fatigue and helps to produce greater satisfaction that reduces absenteeism/turnover problems. Therefore, job rotation can make her job healthier and more productive
How to implement job rotation?
In a “Rose for Emily”, Faulkner uses Emily’s house as a symbol of the barrier Emily forms between herself and society. As society moves through generations and changes over the years, Emily remains the same, within the borders of her own household. The house is described as “in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street”(125), but years passed and more modern houses had “obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood” (125). Faulkner set the house apart from the rest of the neighborhood, and Emily is described in the beginning as “a fallen monument” and a “tradition” indicating that she had not changed in an extended amount of time. The symbol of the house, remaining unchanged through the decades that passed becomes stronger when Emily does not permit tax collectors to pass through the threshold of the house, “She vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before”. Emily’s image of a “monument” to the community’s small society caused her to become exempt from the demands of the state that the rest of the population had to adhere to. Emily’s house enab...
As days go by she finds herself growing to dislike management noting how she is constantly up and about while those that supervise sit all day. She has to constantly be...
Currently, human beings are thinking more on the line of they need work in order to make a living. For that reason, work has become meaningless, disagreeable, and unnatural. Many view work as a way to obtain money and not a meaningful human activity that one does for themselves. The author states that there are two reactions of the alienated and profoundly unsatisfactory character of the modern industrial work. One being the ideal of complete laziness and the other, hostility towards work. Fromm believes the reason why people have animosity regarding work is due to their unconscious mind. Subconsciously, a person has “a deep-seated, hostility towards work and all that is connected to it” says Fromm. I believe what Fromm is saying to be true, after all I witness it everyday. Millions of people each day goes to a work which they are dissatisfied with and that can negatively impact their attitude
William Faulkner stories were usually written within the setting of his home town of Mississippi. Posed after the Civil War and with a twist as we see in “A Rose for Emily”. As a matter of fact, this particular story could be Faulkner’s own family with the similarities of the setting and the fact that both Emily’s and Faulkner family lost the influence it once had.
A single aspect of McClelland’s experience illustrates the issue within warehouse operations. The workers are forced to work in a fast-paced, highly stressful environment with minimal to no social relief to break up the day. Long jaunts and short breaks lead to maximum levels of worker discomfort, but they have no choice but to keep going if they wish to keep their jobs. Always being on the move is unhealthy. The operators of the warehouse obviously disregard the health of their workers for the sake of saving a few
William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” weaves the tale of the troubled Miss Emily Grierson as she struggles against the modernization taking place around her that threatens to disrupt her idealized perception of the past, a woman who is so incapable of adaptation, that she wages a crusade of personal isolation against the changing times in order to protect the only way of life she has ever known. Faulkner tells us Emily herself is a tradition, “Alive Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care” (p 125). As such, her character is depicted as the physical embodiment of tradition, giving human form to the concept of stasis of time, in that she stubbornly stays the same over the years despite, or more accurately, in spite of, the many changes going on around her. Faulkner also refers to her as an “idol”, which furthers the concept of her personification of the past. Emily, much like a statue erected in the town square to pay homage to past idols, is literally frozen in time. She refuses mail service, refuses to pay taxes, and eventually refuses to leave her home, effectively blunting the progression of time, and leaving the townspeople to speculate on the strange recluse that is Miss Emily Grierson. Her inability to let go of the past paralyzes her and prevents her from embracing any kind of future, or even functioning in the present. Her unwillingness to accept the change that inevitably accompanies passing time provides the framework for a less obvious, but no less important, underlying theme in “A Rose for Emily”.
...for what is new to us, we soon learn, is not new to Miss Emily. Repeatedly, she has attempted to control time, to fix people and events in the past, and the stru cture of the story mirrors this. Also, since the story begins and ends, more or less, with Emily's funeral (the events of her life being presented to us in a series of flashbacks), very little actual time passes in the course of the narrativ e. By telling her story after her death, Faulkner shows that, in the only way possible, time now stands still for her. Thus this one small detail, the hidden yet constantly ticking watch, becomes a symbol for the horror and futility that are Emily Grierson.
As already said, Sarah is a high-need achiever and they have a strong desire to assume personal responsibility, are enthusiastic about finding a solution to a problem. Here Sarah is trying to understand her employees’ needs and she demonstrated the trait of responsibility according to Herzberg’s two-factor theory. She should increase her opportunities to increase the interaction with her employees and understand their needs. She should get continuous feedback from her employees by the way of biweekly or monthly one on one meetings, and address their concerns, escalate them as
changing. Faulkner uses the rose as a symbol to show loss in Emily’s life and how she refuses to
...le circumstances, alone in the world, as increasing age, no husband, no children, and no money but not for others to feel pity for her. She did not allow anyone to feel pity for her. As Faulkner might say Emily was a symbol of the humans never wither, always pride. Elements of horror: dead, iron-gray hair gives us a suggestion of the kind of man does not wither. Although Emily died but she has lived forever in the hearts and memories of people at the village of Jefferson, even the destructive love of Emily: killed her sweetheart to keep him beside her forever. Although she was always against the norm of the community, pride to place herself outside the norm, but the people of Jefferson from the old to the young man to the woman they love and respect her. Of course there are the whispers but people think of her as to think of a thing to be respected, maintained.
Everyone deals with these demands differently, affecting the employee’s quality of life and job satisfaction. Though the job and office types and locations have changed over the years, the need for job satisfaction has not. In today’s economy, the job is not as stable as it used to be. One must be prepared for changes in the future. The structural-functional analysis of jobs in the U.S. is governed by the workforce stratification and technology.
The impact from changes in economy, technology, social and lifestyle in today’s environments have boosted the awareness of flexible working arrangements in an organisation. Evidence from the previous study indicated that the competitive working environment and increasing workload had caused family and personal life being neglected (Mary & Chris, 1998). Smith (1993) pointed out that working women should have balance between tasks in the office and responsibility to the family especially on safety, health and children needs. Therefore, Cook (1992) suggested that through the implementation of flexible working hour’s schedule, the responsibilities over children’s safety and education will be more secured. This is due to the fact that they are able to engage for a better coordination between work and responsibilities to the family. This statement is than further supported by Emmott and Hutchinson (1998). They found out that the implementation of flexible working hours schedule could increase and balance women’s responsibilities in work and family. It is a fact that children need love, food, safety and parents’ attention to ensure that children lead to a normal life. This complies with Maslow’s theory of motivation that emphasizes the aspects of safety, love, needs for food, esteem and self-actualisation that needs to be fulfilled by individual in order to increase the motivation at work.
There were three different issues Csikszentmihalyi talked about in this chapter that affects our flow in the workplace. The first issue he talked about was how few jobs nowadays have clear goals. Our workers today don’t set any goals for themselves or their work place, causing them to not care if they don’t finish a task that day. We should be concerned with making clear goals and sticking to finishing them as a way to improve our job. The second reason mentioned is due to contemporary jobs seldom provide adequate feedback. Meaning they don’t give you feedback that will help you improve your skill sets or yourself as an employee. They simply tell you that you are doing just fine like everyone else you work with and to continue doing what
It is sometimes complicated for the company to encourage that when the work-life balance and overload are becoming more of a concern. Furthermore, they are attempting to go beyond restoring the issues and into contribute to superiority. It is accurately because of the viewpoint that the working world is in need to address the work to the branch of psychology that associates with human prosperity, and human power, specifically to positive psychology. This branch of science is of higher importance within the workplace. A number of aspects need to be taken into account, including personal identity, operational complementarity of skills and talents within the organization, and adjust with the company’s system, strategy, objectives, and mission (Davis, 2010). Moreover, organizations can make profits from any number of researches in the field of positive psychology, especially with regard to the job design, strengths, and work
In Today’s world, the composition and how work is done has massively changed and is still continuing to change. Work is now more complex, more team base, depends greatly on technological and social skills and lastly more mobile and does not depend on geography. Companies are also opting for ways to help their employees perform their duties effectively so that huge profits are realized in the long term .The changes in the workplaces include Reduction in the structure of the hierarchy ,breakdown in the organization boundaries , improved and better management tactics and perspectives and lastly better workplace condition and health to the employees. (Frank Ackerman, Neva R. Goodwin, Laurie Dougherty, Kevin Gallagher, 2001)