Motivation Theory and Job Design

One element in business life that persists as a management concern is the attention to productivity. Whether supervising an expansion of his firm's activities, or cutting back on policies in response to sagging demand, a manager continually strives to draw a better return on his capital investment. When this effort is directed toward the human portion of the firm's capital, the manager focuses upon a recurrent problem in business activity -employee motivation. At the blue-collar level, productivity difficulties have been attributed to the well-established practice of maximizing specialization of tasks, that is, attaining efficiency through the development of highly fractionalized, repetitious, and programmed jobs. Blue-collar blues has been the result of this form of job design-a dissatisfaction with work performed, and a justget-by cast to the consequent effort. Motivational problems in managerial positions have also drawn considerable attention. Intense competition for quality in manager talent may have effected a degree of uniformity in administrative ability across business firms. The simple model,