An Online Tool to Gauge Work Design

From Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, May 1, 2017

Earlier this month, Dina Gerdeman, senior writer for Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, wrote about how an employee's poor performance could be related to his or her poorly designed job. In discussing how the quality of the design of a job could be gauged, Dina introduced an online tool that could be helpful to both managers and employees.

The "Job Design Optimization Tool", as introduced in this article, was developed by Robert Simons, the Charles M. Williams Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. This online tool "allows companies to plug in information about a particular job to test whether the person in that role is getting the right mix of responsibility and support from the organization".

Specifically, this tool evaluates the design of a job based on four dimensions: span of control, span of accountability, span of influence, and span of support. The analyzing logic of this tool is that when there is an imbalance between the supply of resources (indicated as the sum of "span of control" and "span of support") and the demand of resources (indicated as the sum of "span of accountability" and "span of influence"), a job is deemed as poorly designed. Here's a screenshot roughly showing how this online tool works:

An exciting feature of this online tool is that it's free! For more information about this work design optimization tool, click here to read the article and have a little try with the tool.

What boosts the chance that injured or ill workers will "return to work" by 20 to 30%?

One answer to this question is.... good work design!

This month, professionals in fields ranging from insurance to rehabilitative services converged on the Pan Pacific Hotel in Perth for WorkCover WA’s 2017 Return to Work Conference (May 2-3, 2017). Among that crowd was Professor Sharon Parker, prepared to present an afternoon keynote address, and Nima Farrell, an organisational psychology placement student working closely with the Centre for Transformative Work Design.

"Return to work" refers to the process in which individuals return back to work (or not) after becoming injured or otherwise unwell and are subsequently deemed unfit to continue working. Despite many of these individuals wanting to start work again, many barriers often prevent them from doing so. One crucial barrier is poorly designed work. Work that is too demanding, overly rigid in processes, or that does not allow the worker much freedom in how they go about their work can be problematic for individuals that already have a limited working capacity due to their ongoing recovery.

To kick things off, Sharon began her keynote by defining what exactly work design is, and gave some examples. She cited research showing, for example, that people are 20-30% more likely to return to work if the job has manageable demands and high levels of job autonomy.

With the audience’s intellectual appetite whetted, Sharon presented the results of a work design survey, completed by a portion of the audience, investigating how people respond to hypothetical return to work scenarios. This measure was designed specifically to tap into people's beliefs about how to support return to work (Andrei et al., in preparation). An example scenario is shown below.

The findings showed that professionals attending the conference were highly likely to choose good work design as a way to help people get back to work, which is encouraging (see the figure below).

However, a less encouraging finding was that individuals with management responsibilities were less likely to think of work design as a solution, suggesting that managers might benefit from additional education about this topic.

A white paper is currently in production, to be made available on this website. This paper will guide practitioners in making practical, yet evidence-based, decisions regarding returning workers.

We welcome your comments and questions about this topic, or your interest in research collaboration on this topic.

#ReturntoWork

Proactivity in Paris

Last week Sharon attended an EAWOP Small Group Workshop on cross-cultural aspects of proactivity in Cergy, near Paris. Around 30 scholars came together from all over the world to discuss potential differences in proactive work behavior across different national cultures. The workshop was organised by Tina Urbach, Deanne den Hartog, Karoline Strauss, Doris Faye, and Sharon Parker (see photo).

After an insightful talk on the pitfalls of cross-cultural research from Professor Peter Smith, University of Sussex, the researchers discussed a wide range of research on proactivity across different countries.

One intriguing presentation by Frank Belchak and Deanne Den Hartog focused on proactivity in Ukraine, or, more accurately, lack of proactivity. This country scores highly on power-distance and uncertainty avoidance, two cultural variables that are likely to constrain proactivity. The culture of Ukraine, coupled with its history of communism and very low levels of autonomy in most jobs, meant proactivity is almost non-existing with Ukraine organisations. Proactivity is considered highly challenges to supervisors, often resulting in abuse from supervisors or negative career consequences. To the extent that proactivity exists, it tends to be narrow in scope, focused on crafting one's immediate job such as by putting in place workarounds to meet targets in spite of a lack of resources.

At the conclusion of the workshop, attendees discussed ways in which we might better unpack cross-cultural differences in proactivity in future research.

#Proactivity