Motivational Approaches to Job Design

Motivational approaches to job design maximize an employee’s drive to work as hard as possible. A motivational approach focuses on making jobs more interesting, challenging, and complex to encourage employees to want to work as effectively and efficiently as they can. The job characteristics model identifies five job dimensions and three psychological states of employees that affect employees’ internal motivation and satisfaction, as well as absenteeism, turnover, and productivity. Employees with high growth need tend to respond more strongly to the presence of the three psychological states than employees with low growth need. One implication of this discussion of growth need strength is that it highlights the importance of considering the fit between individuals and job requirements when making staffing decisions.