Neglected questions in job design: How people design jobs,task-job predictability,and influence of training

Three questions important to job design interventions but neglected in research were explored. First, how do people design jobs? Internal processes (e.g., growth needs) from psychological (or job enrichment) models of job design were not apparent. Instead, groupings of tasks into jobs suggested simple cognitive categorization based on task similarity, reflecting an engineering (or work simplification) orientation. Second, can job design be predicted from task design? Separate measures for job and task designs were unrelated, indicating that the whole is not predictable from the parts in job design, Third, can job design principles be trained? Subjects easily learned and applied different job design approaches.