Where does job characteristics collide?

Hackman and Oldham's 1976 model holds that the work itself can motivate. Five core job dimensions, skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback, produce three critical psychological states: experienced meaningfulness, felt responsibility for outcomes, and knowledge of results. Those states in turn raise internal motivation, satisfaction, and work quality, most strongly for people with a high need to grow. The five dimensions combine into a single Motivating Potential Score, and the Job Diagnostic Survey supplies the items that measure each one. Here autonomy and feedback are two dimensions among five, not the whole account. This is the referent that every later framing on this map either widens or hands to the worker.[1][2]

Unit

A job's design and its motivating potential for the person doing it

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

The Job Diagnostic Survey, the five dimensions combined into a Motivating Potential Score, with internal motivation and satisfaction as outcomes

By 2006 the five core dimensions looked narrow. Morgeson and Humphrey's Work Design Questionnaire organised twenty-one work characteristics into task characteristics (which include the original five), knowledge characteristics such as problem solving and information processing, social characteristics such as feedback from others and interdependence, and features of the work context. The claim is that Hackman and Oldham captured one region of a much larger space, and that the social and knowledge features of a job matter for motivation and satisfaction alongside the task itself. The same underlying idea, that the shape of the work predicts how people respond to it, is now measured with a far wider instrument. What counts as a job characteristic here is broad enough that the original five become a subset.[3]

Unit

The measurable characteristics of a job across task, knowledge, social, and contextual categories

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

The Work Design Questionnaire, twenty-one work characteristics rated on multi-item scales

Wrzesniewski and Dutton's 2001 paper turned the model around. Instead of managers designing jobs, employees themselves alter the boundaries of their work: they change the tasks they do, the people they interact with, and how they see the point of the job. The very features Hackman and Oldham treated as fixed things to be engineered, such as task identity and significance, become things a worker quietly reshapes to make the job more meaningful. This moves the source of a job's characteristics from the organisation chart to the person, and it ties closely to engagement and motivation. It is the same construct seen from the other end: not how work is handed out, but how it is remade.[4]

Unit

The changes a worker makes to the tasks, relationships, and meaning of their own job

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Framed conceptually in 2001, later measured by job crafting scales covering task, relational, and cognitive crafting

Grant's 2007 model adds a characteristic the original five left out: how a job connects the worker to the people it helps. The relational architecture of a job, such as contact with the beneficiaries of one's work and the impact one has on them, shapes the motivation to make a prosocial difference. Where Hackman and Oldham located meaning in the task, Grant locates part of it in whom the task serves, adding a social dimension to the older, largely individual model. This is another widening of what a job characteristic is, this time toward relationships and impact rather than the work itself. The link to motivation is direct: seeing that one's work matters to others is itself a source of drive.[5]

Unit

The relational features of a job, such as contact with and impact on beneficiaries

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Framed conceptually, then tested in field and lab studies manipulating contact with beneficiaries and perceived impact