Reintegrating job design and career theory: Creating not just good jobs but smart jobs
✍ Scribed by Douglas T. (Tim) Hall; Mireia Las Heras
- Book ID
- 102391028
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2010
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 127 KB
- Volume
- 31
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0894-3796
- DOI
- 10.1002/job.613
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The terms jobs and careers have recently been prominent in the headlines and everyday conversations during this time of economic distress conversations. However, now is an excellent moment to ''tighten the belt'', to ''press the reset button''; to find fundamentally new ways of working, to get the best return from all resources. The purpose of this paper is to generate new ideas for redesigning jobs and careers and to make them at once more productive, more fulfilling, and more learning-inducing to the holder. To do this, we will discuss both ''imports and exports'' between job design and career theory. As one of our major suggestions, we introduce and advocate for smart jobs: jobs that can stimulate learning, growth, and employability on the part of the incumbent. This discussion is centered on two central questions: (a) what can job design contribute to our understanding of careers; and (b) what can career theory and research contribute to job design. Let us consider the nature of jobs and careers, and their common heritage in the management literature.
Jobs as the Building Blocks of Careers
The fields of job design and careers are not as distinct as it may appear. The similarity that we see between these two fields may be in part due to the subjective nature of the concepts and in part due to the authors' particular orientation. Consider the domain of job design theory, as stated in the Call for Papers for this Special Issue:
''Prominent theories such as the job characteristics model (Hackman & Oldham, 1976, 1980) and the interdisciplinary work design framework (Campion & McClelland, 1993) have stimulated much of the research in the field. As a result, researchers have accumulated extensive insight about the diverse task, knowledge, and physical characteristics of jobs; the psychological and behavioral effects of job design; the mediating mechanisms that explain their effects; and the individual and contextual factors that moderate these effects. . .'' (Ashkanasy, 2008)