When you look at it, in essence, job enlargement and job enrichment are nothing more than means to regulate employee motivation and satisfaction. They’re two paths to the same end goal; however, they differ widely.
In simple terms, job enlargement is a horizontal expansion of roles, and job enrichment is a vertical expansion. Each has its own problems and cases in which they may be used. Job enlargement is all about motivating the semiskilled or unskilled workers and generally translates to work overload without any real increase in authority or responsibility. In comparison, job enrichment is for the development and satisfaction of skilled employees, not akin to a promotion considering the employee’s track record.
Let’s look at each of the two in detail with examples.
Job Enlargement
Consider a female receptionist or secretary responsible for handling customer support, inquiries, and calls to the front desk. After doing the same thing for a few years, she, as any person would, grew tired of the monotony and asked for a change in pace. Thus, she was given a few more tasks, like interacting with clients and making outward calls. As you can see, while these tasks may have reduced her monotony, they gave her no real extra responsibility or authority and only served as a means to quell her boredom by giving her more work, like a mule getting extra loads.
That’s not to say this doesn’t work or that it’s only the organization taking advantage of the boredom to pile on more work. In companies following a centralized structure, where the number of employees is limited, it can be quite helpful.
Let’s take a look at its features:
- Horizontal Expansion of work
- Widening of the scope of job responsibilities
- Low skill bar for implementation of this strategy
- Upliftment of employee morale
However, the very same comes with a few limitations.
Job enlargement is seen to be rather inefficient for large organizations where the individual workload is already high and control in the hands of the management is low. A few key disadvantages are:
- Increase in workload
- Decreased productivity in the short term
- Can cause issues with the employee union
Directing a more horizontal workflow to an employee may quell their initial boredom, but without increasing their compensation, it will only lead to a downward spiral in their morale. The very same is seen by the Union as worker exploitation for obvious reasons.
Job Enrichment
On the flip side, consider an HR executive responsible for maintaining employee records and interviewing potential candidates. To add more value to the executives’ already existing job profile, he is then assigned some extra work, such as providing funding details to the accounts department or the initial scrutiny of upcoming employees. Unlike in Job Enlargement, these new tasks carry additional responsibility and gives the executive more authority than they previously experienced. This leads to more efficient work affecting the workers’ confidence and morale.
It is the vertical restructuring of a job profile to add various tasks on different levels of an organization to increase the value of an employee in the company.
Some important features are:
- Vertical Expansion
- Adds Self discipline
- Inculcates professionalism
- Adds personal accountability
- Increases authority and responsibility
Unlike job enlargement, job enrichment is not an immediate process that can be meted out immediately, and it needs proper planning and implementation if it is to work as intended.
It involves combining multiple related tasks into a single job profile for an individual, followed by the careful establishment of worker relations as they fit into their new environment. Finally, whether or not it adds responsibility still denotes an increase in workload, so an open feedback channel is extremely important for a glimpse into employee satisfaction.
This seems like a wonderful thing, right, and it is, but it comes with its limitations.
The bar for implementation of job enrichment is quite high, and unless its demands are met it may not work ours appropriately. It has no space in an organization that employs semiskilled or unskilled workers. On top of that, here are a few more barriers to entry:
- Due to the advancement of technology, there may not be a need for a restructuring of job profiles of employees
- There is a high barrier of skill and knowledge required for adding higher-level tasks onto workers
- Implementation of this tactic can take time and cannot be rushed if it is to work successfully
- Lack of a strong managerial team can lead to an uneven distribution of tasks between employees rendering the system useless
- Not all employees can handle the new tasks given to them successfully, especially considering these bring additional accountability
Conclusion
A good way of condensing the pros and cons would be to realize that job enlargement is a short term solution that requires little to no time or experience to execute, whereas job enrichment is a more drawn out, meticulous process that has a high barrier to entry but ultimately leads to the substantial growth of an employee.
