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CHAPTER 6
Job Design
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, the students will have achieved the following objectives:
• Understand a definition of job design.
• Explain the early importance of engineering and efficiency to job design.
• Define and explain Taylorism.
• Understand the application of Taylorism to criminal justice.
• Know how job satisfaction, job stress, and job burnout relate to job design.
• Define and explain job design theory.
KEY TERMS
autonomy
feedback
Hawthorne effect
job characteristics
new criminal justice
personal growth
psychological job requirements
skill variety
LECTURE OUTLINE
I. Psychological job requirements as outlined by Emmery and Emmery.
A. Adequate elbow room: Workers need a sense that they are their own bosses and that
except in unusual circumstances, they will not have a boss breathing down their
necks. But they don't want so much elbowroom that they don't know what to do next.
B. Chances to learn on the job and go on learning: Such learning is possible only when
people are able to set goals that are reasonable challenges for them and to know
results in time for them to correct their behavior.
C. An optimal level of variety: Workers need to be able to vary their work, so as to avoid
boredom and fatigue and to gain the best advantage from settling into a satisfying
rhythm of work.
D. Help and respect from work mates: Workers need to avoid conditions where it is in
no one's interest to lift a finger to help another, where people are pitted against each
F. A desirable future: Workers do not want dead-end jobs; they want opportunities that
allow personal growth.
II. Engineering and Efficiency in Job Design (Taylorism)
A. Engineering and efficiency in job design were largely influenced by Frederick Taylor
and his research partners in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
B. Scientific Management is Taylor’s text on work fragmentation and time motion
studies that aimed to increase the production of line workers.
C. He viewed the common laborer as primarily lazy at work, and thus, needed to be
motivated through pay and leisure.
III. Job Design Theory
1. Development of job design theory
A. After the Hawthorne studies researchers abandoned Taylor’s concern with the
technical variables and focused on job design theory, which focuses on social and
psychological explanations that move beyond Taylorism to include job enrichment
2. Significant Job Characteristics for Employee Motivation
A. Skill Variety: The degree to which jobs require a variety of different activities, skills,
and talents.
B. Task Identity: The degree to which a job requires the completion of a whole task
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V. Job Redesign Programs
A. Since IBM first began to experiment with job redesign in 1943; programs have been
implemented in numerous work settings. In reviewing much of the literature on these
programs, Kelly (1982) suggests that three approaches to work redesign have
emerged.
2. Organization may decide to enlarge a job by adding task to an already existing
position.
3. Finally, organizations may choose job enrichment by adding additional
responsibilities to a position.
VI. Job Redesign in Criminal Justice and Other Human Services
A. Human services workers often value the most enriched aspects of their work or even
take steps to enrich their own jobs.
B. Toch (1978) found that 20 percent of a sample of corrections officers was
independently experimenting with nontraditional enriched roles.
C. Angell model of team policing from 1971 is one of the best known restricting models.
2. The team initiates all investigations and may call on specialists if they believe
there will be a need.
4. To be successful the entire police organization needs to “buy in” to the team
policing concept even though it may reverse the traditional police hierarchy.
C. Enrichment (vertical loading) is redesigning the job to be more rewarding.
D. Enlargement (horizontal loading) is redesigning the job to include a variety of duties.
VII. Job Design and the Community
A. Job design issues within criminal justice organizations cannot be adequately
addressed without the inclusion of broader issues of the community and how
they affect job design efforts.
employment opportunities for persons with disabilities within criminal justice
organizations, architectural issues and accessibility to criminal justice buildings, and
access to health care and emergency services for those with disabilities.
VIII. The New Criminal Justice and Job Design
A. The basic premise of the new criminal justice is that responding to crime is no longer
possible in an organizational vacuum. Crime is a social and political phenomenon, but
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most importantly, it exists within varied communities with unique problems and
issues.
B. To simply view crime as primarily a criminal justice concern is erroneous and
ineffective. Under the new criminal justice, criminal justice organizations would be
consequences of their behaviors, the PSN initiative offers a differing set of strategies
to address serious crime.
CHAPTER SUMMARY
In this chapter we have attempted to integrate knowledge about task design from the
fields of general management and criminal justice. Human services appear to lag behind industry
administrative controls.
One response to the deprofessionalization syndrome is to reconsider carefully the design
of jobs in criminal justice. Theory and research in industrial settings can guide these efforts.
Design theories now incorporate concern for individual differences with measures of task-related
variables. A substantial record of job redesign in industrial settings can guide the criminal justice
new criminal justice organization will be a more permeable organization. It will allow the
differing elements of the community to access it and become more intricately involved.
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In the next chapter we focus on another topic in the discussion of the role of the
individual within criminal justice organizations. Concerns with communication, motivation, and
job design all rely heavily on leadership within organizations, the topic we tackle next.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. The argument has been made that scientific management has been influential in criminal
justice and that, as managers have become more advanced professionally, frontline
criminal justice jobs have become more impoverished. How would you suggest that jobs,
such as those in probation and parole, be designed to provide for enrichment
2. Consider a specific job within the criminal justice system. What characteristics of that job
are sources of motivation, and what characteristics may lead to dissatisfaction or
burnout? How would you redesign the job to emphasize the first set of characteristics and
deemphasize the others? Do you think others would agree, or are there important
individual differences to take into account?
3. Examine the job characteristics model of Hackman and Oldham. How well does that
model account for motivation in criminal justice workers? Describe the core job
characteristics of a particular job. How do they relate to important psychological states?
What specific kinds of knowledge and skills, needs for growth, and satisfactions with pay
and working conditions can influence the outcomes of your particular job? There is some
4. Examine the concept of a “new criminal justice”. Discuss why a concept that necessitates
the involvement of the entire community may be difficult to implement. Using Project
Safe Neighborhoods as an example. What might communities like and dislike about such
programs?
DISCUSSION TOPICS/STUDENT ACTIVITIES
1. Form the students into three groups. Give the groups 20 minutes to analyze the case study
on pages 186 and 187 of the text (“So, You Want to Be a Forensic Scientist”). Assign
2. Have the students discuss why the corrections officers in Toch’s 1978 study were
3. Have the students give specific examples of enrichment and enlargement strategies in
a police department.
5. Have the students discuss what type of employees would be most suited to work in a
modern, “new criminal justice.” Have them make a list of traits that may be required for
these new employees.
INTERNET CONNECTIONS
1. Navigate to the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety website at
2. Visit the Bureau of Justice Statistics website and read the a job position description for
Correctional Officers: http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos156.htm
4. Visit the National Institute of Justice Website to view an innovative program in St. Louis,
