ABSTRACT
The design of a job can strongly affect a person’s motivation and satisfaction. This chapter focuses on how organizations and managers can create a context within which employees experience intrinsic rewards. Although managers use extrinsic rewards directly, they have only indirect control over intrinsic rewards. A manager cannot tell an employee to experience intrinsic rewards such as self-esteem or self-actualization. The manager can only create a context or set of job experiences that lets the employee experience intrinsic rewards. The primary method of designing jobs well into the twentieth century used task specialization. People did small tasks repeatedly. Although such jobs could be done more efficiently, there also were many human costs. The job characteristics theory of work motivation is a well-developed and well-understood job design theory. It is a cognitive theory with many similarities to the cognitive motivation theories.
