What are advantages of job enrichment?

Job enrichment is a strategy used by employers to increase quality of work life and raise employees performance. Job enrichment involves additional of variety motivators to a job (such as challenging tasks, autonomy, feedback and responsibilities) in order to make a job more meaningful to employees. It's main purpose is to increase employee's satisfaction, motivation and productivity. 

This article is going to discuss the benefits of implementing job enrichment in an organization.

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Advantages of job enrichment

The following are the advantages (benefits) of implementing job enrichment.

1. EMPLOYEES ACQUIRE NEW SKILLS

Job enrichment may involve assigning employees with new tasks that require new skills to perform, this can help them learn new skills of performing those new tasks they were not familiar with.

2. BOOSTS WORKING MORALE AND MOTIVATION

Since job enrichment involves addition of various motivators such as feedback, autonomy and challenging tasks to a job, it can help to reduce monotony and boredom and lead to increase in motivation and employees working morale as well as high level performance. 

3. PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT AND PRODUCTIVITY

Adding varieties to a job can raise employees working morale and motivation, this can also result to improvement in employees performance and productivity.

4. REDUCE TURNOVER

Enriching job with varieties and motivators can raise employees satisfaction. This can help to reduce turnover and absenteeism in an organization.

5. SENSE OF ACCOMPLISHMENT

Job enrichment can also bring sense of accomplishment and confidence to employees when they accomplish new tasks that they thought are difficult for them to perform.

6. CREATIVITY

Giving employees challenging tasks, freedom and more control of their jobs can help them to come up with new innovative ideas and become more productive.

You can also read: Job inventory: meaning, advantages and disadvantages

Bottom line:

Though job enrichment is more advantageous to both employees and organizations, it also have some drawbacks. Some of disadvantages of job enrichment include:

• Overloading and stress: Employees may be overwhelmed by additional tasks and responsibilities.
• Mismatch the employees preference: Not every employee prefers addition of tasks and responsibilities.
• Barriers to implementation: The process of job enrichment can be limited by some barriers like organizational system (such as technical HR, control, and supervisory systems).
• Time consuming and costly: Training programs may be required to make employees be able to perform new tasks, this can consume time and money.

Further more, job enrichment does not necessarily lead to greater productivity (according to AHR).

You can also read: 5 Characteristics of a motivating job (Job characteristics model - JCM)

References

What is Job Enrichment? - Pelago

motivation