The impact of job design on employee innovation and intrinsic motivation

Abstract

The actual aim of this research is to unleash the impact of two important dimensions or characteristics of job design on employee innovation and intrinsic motivation. The area of job design in itself is vast when every job characteristic is studies individually but just to keep a grip on the study, The two dimensions of job design considered are skill variety and autonomy. The study at first determines whether there exists a clear relation between the two characteristics of job design under study with that of employee innovation and intrinsic motivation, then further it determines the magnitude of relation between the variables. Because of time and budget constraints, the study is limited to five organizations belonging to four different industries, i.e. banking, telecom, education sector and non-profit organization. Therefore results can be generalized to these sectors. For the sake of data gathering, both the primary and secondary sources were used. Secondary data was collected to gain insight into previous research related to the topic under study. Primary data was collected through survey using structured questionnaires. The evaluation if data was done through statistical software SPSS. Conclusions were drawn on the basis of various tests run on the software. Regression tests were run to check the significance and degree of association between the variables and then frequencies were analyzed to check the responses of respondents towards particular conditions. The study concludes that job autonomy and skill variety, both have a positive relationship with the employee innovation and intrinsic motivation. With the increase in amount of autonomy or discretion given to the employees as well as increase in skill variety leads to a relative increase in employee innovation and intrinsic motivation. apart from these job characteristics, other job characteristics may also have an impact on these outcomes, which can be explored through further research The research implies that the organization should provide a reasonable amount of autonomy to its employees, at least to the extent where it does not disrupt organization’s norms. Apart from that, the organization should also design the tasks in such a way that involves use of variety oftasks, that may eliminate boredom to maximum level and hence enhance employee’s innovative thinking and increase their motivation to perform at their best.