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IN wishing all our readers happiness and prosperity throughout 1973 we are very conscious of the fact that it is a climateric year for the people of these islands. As these words are read we shall be a part of the European Economic Community.

The purpose of this paper is to look at job design, motivation and teamwork. As the market gets more competitive, companies must change their plan of attack on almost a daily basis. They need to answer the question: what is the best way to do business? As employers look at job design they will find that it is not the only factor that indicates how productive employees are in the workplace. Motivation also determines how much energy employees will expend, as well as what tasks will be accomplished, and in what amount of time it will be completed.

Increasing productivity among employees is the key to a successful work group and firm. This paper will look at job design, motivation in the workplace and teamwork as they continue to be the major factors that determine the amount of work an individual does within a firm. Job design includes three main categories: job enlargement, job rotation, and job enrichment. The job characteristics model, a more recent approach to job design, includes five core job characteristics that include skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and job feedback.

The paper presents plenty of evidence that organizations are increasingly relying on teams to handle work once taken on by one person. Self‐managed teams are given the authority to make decisions that were once reserved for managers. Cross‐functional teams are used to improve coordination among different departments involved in carrying out a joint project. Many organizations are implementing these teams successfully into their structure. The result is that they are finding them to be more productive and prosperous than the work of single individuals.

Work teams such as self‐directed teams and cross‐functional teams are becoming increasingly popular among firms in today's work environment. Teams can work together in a dynamic business world to gain an edge over the competition.

Overall, job design, motivation, and teamwork tie together and create a work environment that can either help or hurt an organization. If a proper plan is implemented, then the firm should be more productively successful.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a quality management (QM) philosophy underlies the joint use of operations and human resource management practices, and the relationships with job-related contentment and performance.

Data from an economy-wide survey are used to test hypotheses via latent variable analyses (latent trait and latent class models) and structural equation models. The sensitivity of each path is then assessed using regression models.

Different elements rather than a unified philosophy are identified. A managerial approach that integrates total QM and just-in-time procedures is rare, but is associated with the quality of the product or service delivered. Labor productivity and quality are independent of the level of job-related contentment in the workplace. Although the average workforce is content, high involvement management and motivational support practices are associated with job anxiety. On the positive side, job enrichment is linked to labor productivity, thus suggesting potential gains through job design.

The study adds evidence from a national sample about a comprehensive range of management practices, and suggests distinct outcomes from different elements of QM. Additionally, it shows that performance expectations based on previous studies may not hold in large nationwide heterogeneous samples.

The body of literature in the field now commonly known as the “quality of working life” (QWL) has grown steadily over a period in which the industrialised nations have increasingly come to question the role and status of human beings in the modern technological environment. In recent years concern with the nature of work, its impact upon people, and their attitudes towards it, seem to have sharpened. Investigation of, and experimentation with, the qualitative aspects of working life—its ability to confer self‐fulfilment directly, for example, as opposed to being a means of acquiring goods—has gained momentum under the influence of a unique set of economic, social, political and technological factors. The outpouring of books, reports and articles from a wide variety of sources has, not surprisingly, grown apace.

Many managers have found popular and academic writings on job and organisational design most interesting and have committed a great deal of energy in trying to use them. Terms such as job enrichment, job enlargement, Japanese management, and socio‐technical design have become well known for their potential in responding to problems of job dissatisfaction, labour instability, and poor workmanship. Ways in which “popular paperback” theories, as well as other more systematic organisational theories of design might be customised to the particular needs of the organisation are illustrated.

The first section of the article provides readers with an overview of the most widely used career development interventions including alternative career paths, assessment centers, career coaching/counseling, cross‐training, flexitime, job enlargement, job enrichment, job rotation, job sharing, phased retirement, sabbaticals, and temporary assignments. Each intervention is described and accompanied with an example. The second section of the article presents three case studies: When woodworkers won’t; How do we keep going from here? and Opportunity in scarce resources. Each case is accompanied with a series of discussion questions and answers. Managers, trainers, and/or consultants can use the article and its case studies to facilitate discussions among employees regarding the potential benefits and drawbacks of various career development interventions.

The second category of factors, called motivators, are those which have been found to produce greater efficiency on the job through growth, satisfaction and, in essence, motivation. Whilst both set of factors have a part to play in motivating employees, there are limited effects from ‘hygiene’ factors but far more effective and lasting motivation from the ‘motivator’ factors.

The term work structuring was defined by the Dutch electronic company, Philips NV, as:

In the field of innovation, there is growing interest in exploring the factors that determine the extent to which firms can learn from external sources. However, most previous studies neglect the role of human factors. Little is known about which employee behaviors are desirable for boundary-spanning learning activities and which human resource management (HRM) practices are appropriate to respond to external knowledge transfer across boundaries. To fill this gap, the authors investigate the role of empowerment-focused HRM in interfirm learning and explore the integration of external inputs from the perspective of employees.

Based on empirical survey data collected from different countries, the authors test the proposed model with structural equation modeling.

The authors’ findings indicate that empowerment-focused HRM practices, including job enrichment, job autonomy, teamwork and cross-functional communication, are positively associated with relationship learning.

In this study, the authors present a theoretical explanation for how empowerment-focused HRM may influence firm's innovation through relationship learning process and provide empirical evidence regarding the specific HRM practices that can have different effects on the different phases of relationship learning.

The purpose of the study is to describe the characteristics of the team designs in a call centre in the United Kingdom (UK) and The Philippines (RP). As the design of teams is influenced mainly by sociotechnical system theory and lean production, these are used as landmarks in the comparison.

The primary sources of information were recorded interviews with team members and their supervisors and observation of team operations. Outgoing personnel were also interviewed. Actual day‐to‐day operation of the teams was observed over a period of three months.

The case studies exhibit the characteristics of diverse production models in service firms. The UK case study was approaching the STS model whereas the RP case study was approaching the LP model but veering more to the mass production model of service firms.

The mass production model is similar to the LP model in the following dimensions: type of coordination, workplace, leadership style, job enrichment, work pace, work method, grouping of tasks, degree of seclusion and cycle time. It differed from the LP model as there are dimensions which are non‐existent in the mass production model. These are interdependence, job enrichment, job enlargement and motivation.

Although the mass production team design is acceptable in the manufacturing sector, it is doubtful whether it will work effectively in the service sector. Practising managers of service entities have the responsibility of devising appropriate human resource programs to mitigate the negative effects of the mass production model. Similarly, in adopting the STS model, management has to ensure that the autonomy which is the selling feature of STS is not being abused at the expense of quality service.

The study presents the differences between the STS, LP and mass production team models of service firms with respect to four sociotechnical principles, i.e. minimal critical specification, boundaries, multifunctionality and human values. The practical dimensions of these differences are presented and discussed.