Human Resources and Psychology Is Job Satisfaction.

¶ … human resources and psychology is job satisfaction. Not surprisingly, people have noted that higher levels of job satisfaction are linked to improved job performance. Hackman and Oldham were some of the first researchers to really highlight the relationship between job characteristics and job satisfaction. "Their Job Characteristics Model (JCM) argued that, essentially, enriched or complex jobs are associated with increased job satisfaction, motivation, and work performance. More specifically, they assumed that five core job characteristics…influence three critical psychological states…which in turn affect work outcomes (Fried & Ferris, 1987). The five core job characteristics include skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback from job (Fried & Ferris, 1987). The three critical psychological states include the experienced meaningfulness of the work, the experienced responsibility for outcomes of the work, and knowledge of the actual results of the work activities (Fried & Ferris, 1987). The work outcomes that are impacted by the job characteristics and psychological states include internal work motivation, growth satisfaction, overall job satisfaction, work effectiveness, and absenteeism (Fried & Ferris, 1987). While other researchers have developed models to measure job satisfaction and motivation, there has been surprisingly little research in the area. The reality is that few of the job satisfaction models make a strong link between job characteristics and job satisfaction. Furthermore, "only the job characteristic model of Hackman and Oldham explicitly describes five work factors relevant to job satisfaction: variety in skills; task identification; task meaningfulness; autonomy;

and feedback" (van Saane et al., 2003).

JCM

The JCM asks a series of 23 questions, aimed at determining the characteristics of various jobs. It measures five different job characteristics: skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and job feedback (Cengage, 2010). Many of the questions focused on my perceptions about the responsibility I had for the job, whether I was involved in the completion of the task, how much freedom I had to perform the job, my perception of the importance of the job to the company's success, and the variety of skills that I felt I used to perform the job. Questions were asked in different manner, wish me selecting an answer from 1 (very nondescriptive) to 5 (very descriptive).

My score on the JCM

For this inventory, I answered the questions based upon my job as a customer service representative at a large charitable organization. My score for skill variety was 12/5, my score for task identity was 5, my score for task significance was 5, my score for autonomy was 6/4 and my score for feedback was 26/6. Looking at those results, one can see that I did not find my job to have a significant amount of variety, nor did I feel as if I could use all of my skills to do the job. However, my high scores for task identity and task significance showed that I felt that the job was both important to the company and important to the consumers that I was serving. One of the best features of my job, which I have noticed differs from other customer-service positions, is that all of the customer-service representatives in the call center had full authority to settle a call, without having to resort to finding a manager. However, the job description was not very flexible, and, while feedback was continuous, it did not actually give an employee a means of moving upward in the company.

My total motivating potential score (MPS) was obtained by combining the skill variety, take identity, and task significance scores, then dividing those by 3 (in other words, finding the average of them), then multiplying that number by the autonomy and feedback scores (Cengage, 2010). The total motivating potential score was 26.86 in a range from 1 to 150. Obviously, this appears to be at the low end of the possible score range, though, upon comparing that number with the results obtained by some classmates, it does seem to be characteristic of the type of low-end, entry-level positions that are typically filled by high-school or college-aged students.

I did feel that the JCM gave a realistic view of my job's motivating potential. There are things about my job that I find very motivating. The fact that I am the only customer service contact for a caller, from the beginning of our interaction to the end of our interaction, gives me a significant sense of personal responsibility. Moreover, the interaction with customers and the guided feedback coaching that my employer uses for evaluations allows me to make real-time assessments of my job performance. However, some aspects of my job are almost demeaning. For example, my job performance is docked if I fail to answer the phone or conclude the call with a specific word phrase, which is not always appropriate in all scenarios. I feel like customer service is compromised by a lengthy greeting or conclusion when the person calling is clearly distraught. That lack of autonomy reduces my overall job motivation, a fact that I feel is reflected in the way that the JCM factors autonomy into the overall score.

Discussion

One of the most interesting aspects of the JCM is that it certainly reinforces the idea that someone can be an excellent worker in one job but be a very subpar employee in another position. This is because many of the behaviors that are linked to being a good employee are not based on personal characteristics as much as they are influenced by the external environment.

"Sometimes…changing our behavior can be done most easily by just changing our daily environment" (Markman, 2009).

It may be a critical thing for employers to understand that work environment can really impact job satisfaction. In fact, it is important for professionals in all capacity to consider the totality of the impact of their behavior. "It's useful for those of us who work as professors to once again experience what it's like to be a student in a lecture course. For psychologists to experience an hour as a patient. For the customer service representative to spend 30 minutes on hold. Without such experiences, or at the very least imagining such experiences, it's far too easy to lose sight of the situational factors that influence the people with whom we interact during the course of doing our jobs" (Summers, 2008).