Imagine that you are a manager at Applebee’s, a restaurant chain. Turnover is always a challenge with restaurant employees, and yours are no different. Your restaurant’s turnover rate is a little above the company average, and you would like to improve it. You believe that having better trained and more experienced servers will help you to decrease staffing costs and improve customer service and sales. Fortunately, you have a lot of control over how your restaurant’s jobs are designed and believe that redesigning the work might improve employees’ motivation, absenteeism, and turnover. You recently administered a survey assessing your employees’ job satisfaction, motivation, and perceptions about their jobs at Applebee’s that confirmed your suspicions. Employees provided a lot of honest information and additional comments that you think will be useful in restructuring your stores based on the job characteristics theory.
One thing that you noticed from the survey is that employees' growth need strength tends to consistently be quite high. What does this mean to your job redesign initiative?
a. Your interventions to the core job characteristics are likely to work well with some employees, but not for others.
b. Your interventions to the core job characteristics are likely to work well for some jobs, such as dishwashers, but not all of them, such as hosts/hostesses
c. Your interventions to the core job characteristics are unlikely to be effective.
d. Your interventions to the core job characteristics are likely to be effective.
After carefully considering the most recent employee survey results, you decide that Applebee's core issue is that employees feel that they have no control over how they do their jobs, which makes them feel unable to provide the best customer service that they can. Knowing this, which critical psychological state will you be most targeting in your job redesign initiative?
a. Experienced responsibility for outcomes of the work
b. Knowledge of the actual results of work activities
c. Growth need strength
d. Experienced meaningfulness of the work