MZMORALE ZEROthe antithesis of employee engagement
DIRECTIVE 104 / GROWTH

KEEP THE JOB NARROW

Make employees so efficient that nothing interesting remains.

Reduce each role to a small set of repeatable tasks and send unusual problems to another department. Celebrate the rise in productivity. When employees lose interest, enroll them in an engagement initiative rather than restoring variety or judgment.

THE MECHANISM

Excessive task specialization that erodes skill variety and motivation.

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.
THE UNFORTUNATE PART

Evidence, with limitations.

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.

Scientific boundary: Task variety is one dimension of job design; specialized roles can be effective where fit, autonomy and other resources are adequate.

Sources

These references offer context, not a completed review or a test of this instruction.

PREVIOUS

INCENTIVIZE EVERYTHING

NEXT

GIVE THEM ONE PIECE