Case Study - Job Enrichment

empowerment is the process of enabling or authorizing an individual to think, behave, take action, and control work and decision making in autonomous ways. It is the state of feeling self-empowered to take control of one's own destiny.

Employee involvement and participative management are often used to mean empowerment. They are not really interchangeable.

* Job enrichment is an attempt to motivate employees by giving them the opportunity to use the range of their abilities.

An enriched job should ideally contain:

A range of tasks and challenges of varying difficulties (Physical or Mental)

* A complete unit of work - a meaningful task

Feedback, encouragement and communication

Job enrichment, as a managerial activity includes a three steps technique

1. Turn employees' effort into performance:

Ensuring that objectives are well-defined and understood by everyone.

* Providing adequate resources for each employee to perform well. This includes support functions like information technology, communication technology, and personnel training and development.

* Creating a supportive corporate culture. This includes peer support networks, supportive management, and removing elements that foster mistrust and politicking.

* Free flow of information. Eliminate secrecy.

* Provide enough freedom to facilitate job excellence. Encourage and reward employee initiative. Flextime or compressed hours could be offered.

* Provide adequate recognition, appreciation, and other motivators.

* Provide skill improvement opportunities. This could include paid education at universities or on the job training.

* Provide job variety. This can be done by job sharing or job rotation programmes.

CHARACTERISTICS OF SUPERVISORS

* Good supervisors seem to have many of the same qualities of good teachers and good practitioners. They are empathic, genuine, open, and flexible. They respect their supervisees as persons and as developing professionals, and are sensitive to individual differences (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity) of supervisees. They also are comfortable with the authority and evaluative functions inherent in the supervisor role, giving clear and frequent indications of their evaluation of the counselor's performance. Even more, good supervisors really enjoy supervision, are committed to helping the supervisee grow, and show commitment to the supervision enterprise

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