At its most basic level, job design refers to changing the actual structure of the jobs that people perform. Unlike other change strategies that focus on training employees or altering the context of work, job design focuses squarely on the work itself, on the tasks or activities that individuals complete in their organizations on a daily basis.

Five approaches to job design can be distinguished. Industrial engineering aims to maximize the productive efficiency of individual employees by eliminating unnecessary work; this was the approach adopted by Taylor. Motivation-hygiene theory, or job enlargement, seeks to deal with some of the negative consequences of standardized work by adding more tasks; one of the pioneers of this theory was Herzberg. Job characteristics theory is based on the measurable characteristics of different jobs and the view that people may respond differently to these, taking a psychological approach to job satisfaction. More recently an interdisciplinary framework has been developed which combines mechanistic, motivational and biological approaches to job design.

The four theories above relate to individual jobs. The fifth approach to job design is to design jobs for teams, based around concepts of group tasks, group composition and group norms. Each of the five approaches has its strengths and weaknesses, and it is clear that considerable research is still required to examine how these approaches work in different cultures.

Yitzhak Fried, Anne Cummings & Greg R. Oldham