Job Enlargement
This article covers meaning, importance & example of Job Enlargement from HRM perspective.
What is Job Enlargement?
Job enlargement is defined as the horizontal level expansion of a job by widening the scope and activities related to the job. Job enlargement involves increasing the duties and responsibilities associated at the same job level. Apart from the basic work, job enlargement gives more work to employees which ensures more personal and professional development. Job enlargement may not be accompanied with a job promotion.
Importance of Job Enlargement
Job enlargement is one of the methods of job design, which helps in identifying the skills, duties and responsibilities of an employee. With increased responsibility and accountability, the employees do not perform a single job in a monotonous fashion that can lead to boredom and reduction in working efficiency. Job enlargement makes the individual realize of his increasing importance in the organization due to the increased scope of work that is being performed.
Job enlargement requires the management of the organization to provide their support in providing appropriate training to the employees to make them able to adapt to the enlarged job scope.
This can take up time but the final results of this strategy will always be advantageous to the organization.
Job Enlargement process
Job enlargement should be not be done in an ad-hoc way but it should properly thought through as part of the job design.
Some of the considerations for job enlargement process in the organization are:
1. Alignment with the aspirations
Job enlargement is a great means of increasing motivation but it can also lead to increased work load and stress so it should be used only if there is an alignment as per employee's aspirations to handle more responsibility.
2. Succession Planning
Succession planning is a great reason for job enlargement. It identifies the employees who are ready to take up the new role but can be groomed with new responsibilities in the current role which can act a good stepping stone for the new role or promotion.
3. Skill Development
If new skills are being planned for employees as per the overall strategy of the company, then few good employees can be selected for new responsibilities. These employees can learn new skills and become future leaders.
4. Proper Training Programs
Job enlargement should be accompanied by proper trainings for the employees selected. With new work activities, employees can find a lot of gaps which can be easily filled through correct training programs helping them take up the new responsibilities easily and with more confidence.
Advantages of Job Enlargement
There are several benefits of job enlargement which benefit the employees as well as companies:
1. Job enlargement teaches employees a variety of skills and helps them in their personal as well as professional development.
2. This ensures a wide range of activities which are carried out by the employees, which increases job satisfaction.
3. This method of job enlargement gives an opportunity to employees to earn more than their wages.
4. Reduced monotonous repetitive work and helps in career growth, thereby reducing attrition.
5. Gives more accountability, responsibility and decision making powers to the employees
Disadvantages of Job Enlargement
Apart from the various advantages, there are also several drawbacks of job enlargements:
1. This increases the work-load on employees significantly.
2. Due to immense work pressure, sometimes the quality of output declines for the employee.
Job Enlargement Example
Let us consider an example of a sales executive who is currently playing a role of managing sales leads, meeting with customers and closing deals. Now the job has become a bit monotonous and the person wants more responsibility and autonomy. As per job enlargement, the sales executive based on the performance would be given additional responsibilities of doing market research, finding new customers and grooming new sales executives.
Now as per the current role the person was performing, these new responsibilities are more in tune with sales managers and gives the sales executive motivation but it has to be kept in mind that the new responsibilities should not add too much work load and stress to the employee otherwise it can become counter-productive.
Hence, this concludes the definition of Job Enlargement along with its overview.
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