...Does work place design increase individual job performance and well-being? Morgan A. Niehus Florida Institution of Technology Does work place design increase individual job performance and well-being? Abstract Today more than ever there is more pressure on manager’s to hire and retain top talented people to stay competitive in their respective markets. Quality people have choices in where they work. People will choose a place of employment where they can work hard, be immersed in the latest technology, socialize with a diverse group of people, have pride in their work and share ideas to improve themselves and to improve performance, and have fun doing it. The work design is an integral part in achieving this holy grail of work environments. My objective is to take a look at three individual studies that look at different elements of work design such as employee environmental controls, work place innovation and well-being. I will then summarize my conclusion with a recommend course of research to further prove that providing a well thought out work place design will promote a work place environment that leads to increase job satisfaction, productivity, group unity, collaboration and performance. First let’s define work design. Wikipedia defines work design as the application of Socio-Technical Systems principles and techniques to humanization of work. In other words the goal of work design is to improve job satisfaction, job performance, and work quality, while...
Words: 2615 - Pages: 11
...FUN IN THE WORKPLACE: TOWARD AN ENVIRONMENT-BEHAVIOR FRAMEWORK RELATING OFFICE DESIGN, EMPLOYEE CREATIVITY, AND JOB SATISFACTION By ALEXANDRA M. MILLER A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF INTERIOR DESIGN UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2005 Copyright 2005 by Alexandra M. Miller ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I would like to thank my committee chair, Dr. Margaret Portillo, for her direction and guidance throughout the entire research process. I would also like to thank Dr. M. Joyce Hasell for her support and valuable expertise. Additional thanks go to Dr. Larry Winner for his indispensable assistance as a statistical consultant. I would also like to thank PUSH for providing an excellent example of a fun workplace. In particular, I would like to thank partners John Ludwig, Chris Robb, and Rich Wahl for allowing me to conduct a case study of their business. Additional thanks go to Ron Boucher, Jourdan Crumpler, and Gordon Weller for taking the time to participate in interviews. I would also like to express my gratitude to Kathryn Voorhees for her help, humor, and friendship as she accompanied me throughout the research process. Finally, I would like to thank all of my friends and family for their support. In particular, I would like to thank to my parents for their constant support and for helping me to achieve my dreams. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ..........
Words: 25449 - Pages: 102
...Analysis of Apple’s Workplace Design 8 6.0 Conclusion 11 7.0 References 13 8.0 Appendix 16 1.0 Introduction Apple Inc was found by Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne in 1976. Apple is a successful and well-known company that designs, creates and produces consumer electronics, computer software and personal computers. Apple is also well recognised for the used of technology that is cutting edge and the innovation that take place on the products. Macintosh computers, iPhone, iPod and iPad are the best-known hardware products of Apple. As the slogan that used in the advertising in 1997, “Think Different” and Steve Job’s creativity and passion in making innovation and differentiate the products from competitors has been the culture of Apple. The leadership of Steven Jobs and the culture that embedded inside the company have drive the success of Apple and become the market leader. As culture informs success and leadership drives culture (Elliot, 2012). 2.0 Focus of Report on Culture on Organisation Practice Nowadays, it has been recognised that different organisations have distinctive culture that embedded in the organisation. Every organisation has the unique cultures that makes it different from the other organisation and give people a sense of direction in achieving the goal. Therefore, it is essential to understand the culture of organisation. This report will be primarily focus on the practice within Apple, which will be looking at the workplace design that formed by...
Words: 4597 - Pages: 19
...Job design (also referred to as work design or task design) is the specification of contents, methods and relationship of jobs in order to satisfy technological and organizational requirements as well as the social and personal requirements of the job holder.[1] Its principles are geared towards how the nature of a person's job affects their attitudes and behavior at work, particularly relating to characteristics such as skill variety and autonomy.[2] The aim of a job design is to improve job satisfaction, to improve through-put, to improve quality and to reduce employee problems (e.g., grievances, absenteeism). Job design follows job analysis i.e. it is the next step after job analysis. It aims at outlining and organising tasks, duties and responsibilities into a single unit of work for the achievement of certain objectives. It also outlines the methods and relationships that are essential for the success of a certain job. In simpler terms it refers to the what, how much, how many and the order of the tasks for a job/s. Job design essentially involves integrating job responsibilities or content and certain qualifications that are required to perform the same. It outlines the job responsibilities very clearly and also helps in attracting the right candidates to the right job. Further it also makes the job look interesting and specialised. Benefits of Job Design The following are the benefits of a good job design: 1. Employee Input: A good job design enables a good job...
Words: 1181 - Pages: 5
...Open University of Malaysia WORKPLACE ENVIRONMENT AND ITS IMPACT ON EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE A study submitted to Project Management Department in Saudi Aramco BY Nowier Mohammed Al-Anzi Open University of Malaysia 2009 i Open University of Malaysia WORKPLACE ENVIRONMENT AND ITS IMPACT ON EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE A study submitted to Project Management Department in Saudi Aramco Nowier Mohammed Al-Anzi 51060418 Project Paper Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Master of Business Administration Open University of Malaysia 2009 ii DECLARATION Name Student's Number : Nowier Mohammed Al-Anzi : 51060418 I hereby declare that this project paper is the result of my own work, except for quotations and summaries which have been duly acknowledged. I hereby verify this research has not been submitted in substance for any other degree. Signature:ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Date: ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Supervisor Name: Mr. Iqbal Singh Kaundali Signature:ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Date: ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ iii APPLICATION TO CONDUCT RESEARCH PAPER PART A: STUDENT PARTICULAR 1. Name Student’s Number : Nowier Mohammed Al-Anzi : 51060418 PART B: PARTICULARS ABOUT THE PROJECT 1. Title of the project : Workplace Environment and Its Impact on Employee Performance : To determine the...
Words: 25542 - Pages: 103
...detrimental to the organization; sparking concern from the management team and identifying a substantial need for reevaluation and reorganization of the company. In this case, issues of job design, workplace inequity, organizational culture and employee evaluation and motivation within RR Feeds Inc. are analyzed and recommendations are provided to the management team for implementation. Job Design In the past two years RR Feeds has reduced staff employment and restricted their spending by cutting bonuses. Their employees are expected to work harder for less compensation; in essence, the job description has been altered. In result, employee morale has decreased and negative changes in employees’ attitudes and behavior have reduced the company’s productivity and efficiency. Management should consider a job redesign that identifies the needs and wants of the employees and the organization as well as remove workplace frustrations that hinder production. Job Redesign. In order to align employees with the new job expectations it is important that management is clear about the objectives of the redesign. RR Feeds redesign efforts should focus on improving productivity, job satisfaction, staff retention and quality of work life. In respond to the recent reduction in staff, the new job design should implement employees working with others in a team effort rather than...
Words: 1287 - Pages: 6
...is the science of adapting the job and/or the equipment and the human to each other for optimal safety and productivity.Ergonomics refer to the application of scientific information and systems for human use, specifically when it comes to job design, work area efficiency and quality. It is very important because it relates to everything that involves people including work systems, sports, leisure, health, safety etc. It gives way to socio technical approach to job design that involves keeping the social needs of people in mind to design jobs and then using technology to fulfill it. Ergonomics deals with the interaction of technological and work situations with the human being. The basic human sciences involved are anatomy, physiology, and psychology. These sciences are applied by the ergonomist towards two objectives: the most productive use of human capabilities, and the maintenance of human health and well-being. In a phrase, ‘the job must fit the person’ in all respects, and the work situation should not compromise human capabilities and limitations. An ergonomically designed space will include an ergonomic assessment of the following: • The individual's posture, their routine tasks and what time is spend on particular activities, movements or repetitious actions • The job tools, which includes any devices required to perform your duties, like the mouse, the printer and the scanner The surroundings of your workplace, which includes your work surface...
Words: 527 - Pages: 3
...MS Office Class Proposal Table of Contents Summary 3 Description 3 Course Objectives 3 Course Curriculum 3 Course Standards 3 Course Outline 4 Equipment Needed 5 Financial 5 Assumptions 5 Documentation 6 Summary This proposal is written to communicate the objectives, curriculum, standards and potential revenue in regards to an MS Office class. Description This class will be held 2 days a week for a semester in length. The location and times will be determined as the class is developed. The class will be designed for 12 (twelve) students, but will adaptable due to space. It will be taught in various formats, but not limited to lecture, textbook, and hands-on training. Student will also earn up to 2 (two) High School technology credits. The course will be offered in three sections. The sections must build upon each other. Course Objectives The objective of this course is to provide the background for the students to become knowledgeable in the components of Microsoft Office. It will also provide them with the knowledge and expertise to fulfill many roles in today’s society, be preparing them in the field of office systems. Course Curriculum Textbook - Microsoft Office 2007: Introductory Concepts and Techniques, Windows Vista Edition, 1st Edition ISBN-10: 1423927133 Course Standards This course will be taught to Sunshine State Standards (See Documentation). Course Outline Essential Introduction to Computers Microsoft Windows Vista 1. Introduction...
Words: 3876 - Pages: 16
...workforce. This study seeks to examine the working conditions on the performance of employees. It is also aimed at identifying the perception of employees about their working conditions. The study employs descriptive and sample survey techniques. A sample of 50 employees was selected from the Madina Polyclinic in Ghana where the study is focused by the application of stratified and sample random sampling methods. Data was collected by the use of a well-designed questionnaire. It was found that casual workers were not satisfied with their working conditions while aside them other employees were somehow/ averagely satisfied with their working conditions. Working conditions such as quietness of workplace, office arrangement, availability of working materials, salaries, bonuses and allowances and job security have an influence on the performance of employees. It was thus recommended that to ensure improvement in employee performance and productivity, measures should be put in place to establish a conducive working condition for employees. 1.1 INTRODUCTION Management’s new challenge is to form an environment that attracts, retain and motivate its workforce. The responsibility lies with managers and supervisors at all levels of the organization. Businesses must step outside their time-honored roles and comfort zones to look at new ways of working. They have to create a working environment where people enjoy what they do, feel like they have a purpose, have pride in what...
Words: 6072 - Pages: 25
...person may fall, no obstruction that may delay or stop the fall unless there is no possibility of the fall continuing after the obstruction is reached. The consequences of not applying ergonomics or wrongly applying ergonomics may increase risks of ill-health and injury, dissatisfaction and discomfort to the workers. Besides that, many examples of inappropriate design of the equipment and workplaces systems (Min, Kim et al. 2012). Further investigation of falling from height accident shows falling from the elevation took largest portion with 181 deaths, followed by 14 deaths from slip, trip and fall. Furthermore, 59 workers were killed in scaffolding accidents as cited in Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency Data 2009. Falls from height, which include fall from ladders, scaffolding and roofs and slipping is the most frequent accident. A lack of compliance in working platform design and inconvenient of working area contribute this accident at site (Bentley 2009). Referring to John, basic design processes of analysis, synthesis and evaluation were iterating throughout the design process. Extend of these design process, the ergonomics methodology might divide into five types of input that includes data on people, system development, evaluation of system performance, assessment of effects on people and the organization ergonomic programs (John R Wilson 1995). As stated by Mats, the ongoing systematic collection, interpretation analysis of health on exposure data in the...
Words: 1473 - Pages: 6
...Company profile McDonalds McDonald's is the world's largest chain of hamburger fast food restaurants, serving around 68 million customers daily in 119 countries across 35,000 outlets. Founded in the United States in 1940, the company began as a barbecue restaurant operated by Richard and Maurice McDonald. In 1948, they reorganized their business as a hamburger stand using production line principles. Businessman Ray Kroc joined the company as a franchise agent in 1955. He subsequently purchased the chain from the McDonald brothers and oversaw its worldwide growth. A McDonald's restaurant is operated by either a franchisee, an affiliate, or the corporation itself. The McDonald's Corporation revenues come from the rent, royalties, and fees paid by the franchisees, as well as sales in company-operated restaurants. In 2012, the company had annual revenues of $27.5 billion and profits of $5.5 billion. According to a 2012 BBC report, McDonald's is the world's d1.5 million of whom work for franchises. McDonald's primarily sells hamburgers, cheeseburgers, chicken, French fries, breakfast items, soft drinks, milkshakes, and desserts. In response to changing consumer tastes, the company has expanded its menu to include salads, fish, wraps, smoothies, fruit, and seasoned fries. Marlboro Marlboro is the best selling brand of cigarettes in the world. It is made by Philip Morris USA (a branch of Altria) within the United States, and by Philip Morris International...
Words: 1637 - Pages: 7
...[pic] FACULTY OF BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT SEPTEMBER SEMESTER 2011 ASSIGNMENT BBGO4103 ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR Table of Contents 1. Introduction – Organisation Background 2 2. Employees Motivation Level Using Job Characteristic Model (JCM) 3 2.1 Skill Variety 3 2.2 Task Identity 3 2.3 Task Significance 4 2.4 Autonomy 4 2.5 Feedback 4 3. Workplace Environment 5 3.1 Physical Environment 5 3.2 Workplace Design 7 4.0 Recommendations 8 5.0 Conclusion 10 1.0 Introduction – organisation background Established in December 1989, Maruwa (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd is located at Lot 27, 28, 30 & 31, Batu Berendam FTZ, Phase 3, Industrial Estate, 75350 Melaka. The company’s roots are in the heart of Japan’s fast growing industrial valley, whereby its headquarters, Maruwa Ceramic Co. Ltd. is located in Aichi, Japan, where accuracy, reliability and precise engineering is a way of life. Maruwa Malaysia currently has a total of nine factories, all located within each other’s vicinity. The factory built-up area encompasses 98,745 square meter, housing more than 1000 employees, made up of various nationalities i.e. Malaysians, Japanese, Indonesians, Bangladeshis and Myanmars, in which over 60% are female employees and the majority of whom are...
Words: 3329 - Pages: 14
...change one's willingness to exert effort. This willingness sets the foundation of motivation. Over the course of this paper I will discuss three motivational methods job design, human needs, and based on process; a goal-setting theory in which managers can apply to create an environment for employees to exert their efforts in the workplace. I will also discuss how implementing such motivational methods can affect the organization. The first motivational method I will discuss is motivating through job design. Although monetary compensation often accounts for the motivation behind some individuals work efforts, it is not the sole motivator, but it may be because of self-satisfaction which motivates an individual. Motivating through job design permits creating or defining specific jobs or duties tailored to an individual or group of individuals. Managers often design jobs that encourage employees to become skilled, accurate, and efficient at their assigned task. This in itself is motivation. A sense of accomplishment leads to feeling satisfied. It is through this satisfaction that encourages individuals to continue working or perhaps striving for more. According to Lombardi and Schermerhorn (2007), “Job design has the potential to contribute to the achievement of two needed goals—job performance and job satisfaction. These two go hand-in-hand and are not achievable without the other one. Frankly, one without the other can be thought of as insufficient in...
Words: 1112 - Pages: 5
...Conflicts in the Work Place Melody Johnson Strayer University Winter 12’ Professor Albert Yin In this paper I will discuss the affects of conflict, decision making and organizational design in the work place. When people work together, there will be tension and conflict between individuals and groups from time to time. Even in the best of work environments, organizational tension is inevitable. Conflict is the natural outcome of disagreement often resulting from individuals or groups with differing values, desired outcomes, or frame of reference. Such workplace tension produces a situation where executives can spend time up-front by finding resolution through negotiation or spend time on the backend trying to resolve a destructive battle. Left unmanaged, organizational tension and conflict will inflict unnecessary pain through internal struggles and in the worst scenarios cause long term strife to the organization or loss of talented employees. In my current position as a supervisor I am faced with conflict, decision making and organizational designs daily. I supervise a team of investigators and at times there are differences in the workplace amongst the team. As a supervisor it is my job to try to diffuse the situation to ensure that it doesn’t escalate. By diffusing, I would need to come up with a strategy that would benefit both parties. When I was researching Branson, for example Branson believed in hiring the best people to run businesses. People are important so...
Words: 1827 - Pages: 8
...1) Employers operate disability management programs because it gives them a structured way to manage workplace costs associated with workplace illness and injury. Costs can be controlled through maintaining skilled workers and limiting absences to maintain a productive workforce. The program is also thought to “prevent workplace injury and illness and to accommodate workers in a manner that facilitates early and safe return to work.” (Management of Occupational Health and Safety, 2011, 329) I also feel that employers operate disability management programs as a way to keep themselves out of financial hardship and legal issues which could stem from a workplace injury or illness. The goal of a disability management program is for employers to have a set of proactive practices to “prevent or reduce workplace disability; to intervene early in the event of risk or injury; and to provide coordinated management and rehabilitation functions that promote workers’ recovery and safe and timely return to work.” (Management of Occupational Health and Safety, 2011, 329) I believe a common problem with disability management is that employers are focused on lowering the financial impact of injury or illness in the workplace. Due to this fact, the disability management practices tend to focus more on returning employees to work following an injury, rather than preventing the injury before it happens. I also think that the programs fall short following return to work because it is common...
Words: 1423 - Pages: 6
