An Empirical Study on Job Differentiation and Tenure

Executive Summary In this paper we propose that differentiation, or the tailoring of jobs to groups of individuals, may allow proactive human resource managers to maximize job satisfaction within a workforce. We focus our attention on job on the basis of organizational tenure because we feel that this basis is most likely to be acceptable to organizational members, and test our proposal using data collected at a factory in Northern Mexico and structural equation modeling. We find that intrinsic job characteristics are more closely associated with overall job satisfaction for new employees than for senior employees, and that one aspect of voice at work is more closely associated with overall satisfaction for senior employees than new employees. We conclude by noting that these results do in fact provide a basis for job on the basis of tenure, and by offering suggestions as to how managers can use this knowledge to improve overall job satisfaction within their workforces. Ilgen and Hollenbeck define a job as a set of task elements grouped together under one job title and designed to be performed by a single (1992:173). This implies that a job is something fixed within an organization, so that all individuals occupying similar jobs should behave similarly and be treated similarly. However, in this paper we will use the term differentiation to describe the situation in which a human resource manager seeks to tailor jobs to groups of individuals, with the goal of maximizing overall job satisfaction within the workforce. More formally, job occurs when an HR manager offers different sets of job attributes to categories of individuals occupying similar positions within an organization. This is not a new idea. For example, Butler and Waldroop write about sculpting, which occurs when senior managers match ... people to jobs that allow their deeply embedded life interests to be expressed (1999:146), and which they view as crucial to retaining talented professionals within organizations. Also, Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) write about crafting a job, which occurs when the employees themselves make changes in the task or relational boundaries of their work, and so shape or redefine their own jobs. However, Butler and Waldroop envision job sculpting as something done on a limited scale, for example when a senior manager is dealing with a small number of direct subordinates. In fact, they comment that ... job sculpting is challenging; it requires managers to play both detective and psychologist (1999:146). Therefore, this kind of job sculpting is not likely to be feasible on a large scale, for example when a HR manager is dealing with a workforce numbering in the hundreds. Likewise, Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) recognize that in situations of great task interdependence, or those in which the actions of one employee are yoked strongly to the actions of others, there is little opportunity for individual job crafting. Therefore, neither of these two concepts applies well to the traditional factory setting, in which large numbers of employees are engaged in highly interdependent tasks. Nonetheless, in this paper we will seek to show how HR managers in such settings can practice job and as a result increase overall job satisfaction within the workforce. Organizational Tenure as a Basis for Job Differentiation The antecedents of job satisfaction can be classified into two major categories: personal and environmental (Spector, 1997). Personal factors include both individual personality characteristics such as locus of control or extroversion/introversion, and demographic characteristics such as age or sex. Environmental factors include such job attributes as the nature of the task to be performed, relationships with other people at work, and rewards. It follows that individuals working within the same organization and even in similar jobs may experience different environments if they are assigned different tasks, engage in different relationships, or enjoy different rewards. …