Herzberg attached greater importance to job enrichment in his two factor theory. Job enrichment implies enriching the content of job or the deliberate upgrading of responsibility, scope and challenge in work. Job enrichment is a motivational technique which emphasises the need for challenging and interesting work. It suggests that jobs be redesigned so that intrinsic satisfaction is derived from doing the job.
In its best application, it leads to a vertically enhanced job by adding functions from other organisational levels so as to contain more variety, and challenge and offering autonomy and pride to the employee.
The term job enrichment should be distinguished from the term ‘job enlargement’. Job enlargement attempts to make a job more varied by removing the dullness associated with performing repetitive operations. It involves a horizontal loading or expansion i.e. the addition of more tasks of the same nature. But in jobs enrichment, the attempt is to build into job a higher sense of challenge and importance of achievement. Job enrichment involves vertical loading. Additions in job enrichment require higher levels of skills and competence.
Some of the principles which make job enrichment effective are:
1) Give the workers the freedom of operation and responsibility.
2) Managers should have better understanding of what workers really want. They wish that their managers feel concerned about the welfare.
3) Workers should be consulted and given the chance to offer their suggestions.
4) Introduce new and more difficult tasks at each step, giving workers an opportunity to learn and specialise.
5) The workers should be given frequent feedback on their performance. Recognition and appreciation of their work induce them to learn more. It also eliminates possibilities of wide variations. This increases the efficiency of workers.
