MZMORALE ZEROthe antithesis of employee engagement
DIRECTIVE 064 / GROWTH

KEEP THE JOB NARROW

Mastery is easiest to manage when the work contains as little variety as possible.

Specialize responsibilities until employees repeat a small set of tasks with exceptional efficiency. Route anything unusual to another function. Describe the resulting predictability as role clarity and wait for engagement to become a personal resilience issue.

Primary: GROWTHMEANINGCONTROL
RATIONALE
Narrow jobs reduce variation, simplify training and produce cleaner operating procedures.
SUCCESS INDICATOR
Employees become extraordinarily competent at work that no longer requires much of what they can do.
COMMON FAILURE
Designing jobs with an appropriate level of skill variety and challenge instead of confusing standardization with permanent simplification.
STATUS
Canonical / approved

Reconstructed Handbook series.

THE UNFORTUNATE PART

Unfortunately, the research…

Claim

Work-design research identifies skill variety as a motivational job characteristic associated with experienced meaningfulness and work attitudes. Broader meta-analytic work-design evidence supports relationships between motivational job characteristics and outcomes including satisfaction and internal motivation.

Evidence

The Job Characteristics Model treats skill variety as one contributor to experienced meaningfulness. Subsequent work-design meta-analysis integrated motivational characteristics with social and contextual features and found substantial relationships with employee outcomes.

Strength: Strong

Sources

The Directive is satire. The research summary is not. Evidence is stated separately and qualified to the underlying literature rather than treated as proof of the joke.

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