By intent or default, all jobs have a design that constitutes a context for their incumbents, and that design is embedded in a larger work context. The purpose of this article is to examine the unintended and sometimes negative consequences of job designs and their related contexts. Several themes will emerge in what follows. First, the larger context in which jobs are embedded can either shape or countervail intended job design effects. Second, many job characteristics have a paradoxical doubleedged quality. For example, the same autonomy that leads some academics to produce creative scientific breakthroughs enables others to produce crackpot ideas in the name of academic freedom. Third, the question Job design for what purpose? is important to answer. Thus, job designs that support high in-role performance might not support creativity or learning or citizenship or ethical behavior or employee health. Finally, the identity of job incumbents is an important but seldom examined factor in the consequences of job design.
The Fragility of Meaningfulness
In a comprehensive test of the Job Characteristics Model, Johns, Xie, and Fang (1992) found that experienced meaningfulness was a particularly robust mediator of the connection between all core job characteristics and work outcomes, a finding subsequently confirmed in a meta-analysis by Humphrey, Nahrgang, and Morgeson (2007). Given the potent affective and motivational properties of meaningfulness, it should play a key role in the design of jobs. However, research has shown that the contextual cues that stimulate meaningfulness can be rather subtle, and thus overlooked, that other aspects of job design or job context can damage inherent meaningfulness, and that people can extract meaningfulness from cues rather far removed from the intended design of the job.
On the surface, soliciting scholarship money for deserving students or detecting cancer would seem to be inherently meaningful tasks. However, as Grant and Parker (2009) imply, such jobs, as designed, often inadvertently isolate incumbents from beneficiaries in a way that attenuates empathy and motivation to help. Thus, in a field experiment, Grant and colleagues (Grant, Campbell, Chen, Cottone,