Work Redesign (Prentice Hall Organizational Development Series) [Paperback]

Work Redesign is written in 1980 and (unfortunately) just as relevant today as it was in 1980! The book is about redesigning work so that it increases the internal motivation of the employees. This increases their job satisfaction and their quality of work. It describes when, how and when not and how not to do this.

The consists of four parts: Introduction, individuals, teams and change.

The first part, simply called "introduction" explores the relationship between people and their job and asks, is there a problem? The authors conclude there is, work is getting more and more boring and it is creating social problems. It then looks at two approaches, changing the people or changing the work and summarizes the research done on both these approaches. It also describes the approach taken in this book and puts it in context with the other approaches.

The second part covers individuals on their job. It first looks at the properties that the job should have after it was redesigned. The next chapter then proposes a model for diagnosing the current job. This is needed so that you know whether the job actually needs to be redesigned and, perhaps more important, what parts of the job need to be redesigned. The last chapter in this part then gives some principles and an example of redesigning jobs.

The third part covers redesigning work for teams. It covers the difference between groups and self-managed work groups and only focuses on self-managing teams. The first chapter models teams effectiveness and talks about the change of the manager role when moving to self-managing work. The second chapter in this part when talks about how to support self-managing teams and how to create the organizational context. It doesn't really cover much about the actual work redesign and instead just points back to that of the individual tasks. The redesign principles are the same.

The last part talks about the change. The first chapter in this part summarizes the choices that need to be made when redesigning work. Choices like including individuals, focus on theory or intuition etc. The last chapter (excellent chapter) talks about redesign as a technique for bringing organizational change and especially covers the difficulties of doing so. It explains how redesign can piggyback on other changes. The last few pages make a sober prediction about the future and the influence of work redesign. Unfortunately, the authors prediction has come true.

Work redesign is an excellent book. Well-written, extremely well researched and entertaining. Also it is thought-provoking. I enjoyed reading this book very much (like other work from Hackman) and would recommend it to everyone. Five stars, without a doubt.

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