This concept talks about how to design a job so that it is motivating for a person. It is based upon the ideas of Vroom, in his expectancy theory, but you don’t have to know this theory to understand this concept.

Hackman and Oldham propose that high motivation is related to experiencing three psychological states whilst working:

1. Meaningfulness of work: that labour has meaning to you, something that you can relate to, and does not occur just as a set of movements to be repeated. This is fundamental to intrinsic motivation, i.e. that work is motivating in an of itself (as opposed to motivating only as a means to an end)
2. Responsibility: that you have been given the opportunity to be a success or failure at your job because sufficient freedom of action has given you. This would include the ability to make changes and incorporate the learning you gain whilst doing the job.
3. Knowledge of outcomes: This is important for two reasons. Firstly to provide the person knowledge on how successful their work has been, which in turn enables them to learn from mistakes. The second is to connect them emotionally to the customer of their outputs, thus giving further purpose to the work (e.g. I may only work on a production line, but I know that the food rations I produce are used to help people in disaster areas, saving many lives)

In turn, each of these critical states are derived from certain characteristics of the job:

1. Meaningfulness: derived from:
   • Skill variety: using an appropriate variety of your skills: too many might be overwhelming, too few, boring
   • Task Identity: being able to identify with the work at hand as more whole and complete, and hence enabling more pride to be taken in the outcome of that work (e.g. if you just add one nut to one bolt in the same spot every time a washing machine goes past it is much less motivating than being the person responsible for the drum attachment and associated work area (even as part of a group)
   • Task Significance: being able to identify the task as contributing to something wider, to society or a group over and beyond the self. For example, the theory suggests that I will be more motivated if I am contributing to the whole firm’s bonus this year, looking after someone or making something that will benefit someone else. Conversely I will be less motivated if I am only making a faceless owner wealthier, or am making some pointless item (e.g. corporate give-away gifts)
2. Responsibility is derived from autonomy, as without being given freedom of self-decision, then it is not possible for me to succeed (only for the person who told me what to do).
3. Feedback is the crucial element that creates knowledge of outcomes. This can be anything from production figures through to customer satisfaction scores. The point is that the feedback offers information that once you know, you can use to do things differently if you wish.

Knowing these critical job characteristics, the theory goes, it is then possible to derive the key components of the design of a job:

1. Varying work to enable skill variety
2. Assigning work to groups to increase the wholeness of the product produced and give a group to enhance significance
3. Delegate tasks to their lowest possible level to create autonomy and hence responsibility
4. Connect people to the outcomes of their work and the customers that receive them so as to provide feedback for learning

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