Direct Observation of incumbents performing their jobs enables the trained job analyst to obtain first-hand knowledge and information about the job being analyzed.
The Observation method of Job Analysis is suited for jobs in which the work behaviors are 1] observable involving some degree of movement on the part of the incumbent, or 2] job tasks are short in duration allowing for many observations to be made in a short period of time or a significant part of the job can be observed in a short period of time, or 3] jobs in which the job analyst can learn information about the job through observation.
Jobs in which the Observation method is successful include:
- Machine Operator/Adjuster
- Construction Worker
- Police Officer/Patrol Officer
- Flight Attendant
- Bus Driver
- Housekeeper/Janitor
- Skilled Crafts Worker
Advantages
With direct Observation, the trained job analyst can obtain first-hand knowledge and information about the job being analyzed. Other Job Analysis methods [such as the interview or questionnaire] only allow the job analyst to indirectly obtain this information. Thus, with other methods of Job Analysis, sources of error [ommissions or exaggerations] are introduced either by the incumbent being interviewed or by items on the questionnaire. With direct observation of the incumbent, these sources of error are eliminated.
Direct Observation allows the job analyst to see [and in some cases experience] the work environment, tools and equipment used, interrelationships with other workers, and complexity of the job.
Direct Observation of incumbents may be necessary to support testimony if the incumbent or applicant for the job has sued the employer. A Job Analysis is necessary to support personnel actions that were taken. However, the job analysis may be of limited value if the job analyst has not seen the incumbent perform the job. In other words, relying solely on the incumbent's description of their job may not withstand scrutiny in a court of law.
Testimony about jobs personally done is direct testimony and not subject to hearsay rules.
Disadvantages
One problem with the direct Observation method of Job Analysis is that the presence of an observer may affect the incumbent causing the incumbent to alter their normal work behavior. It is important for the analyst to be unobtrusive in their observations. Incumbents may alter their work behavior if they know they are being observed.
This method is not appropriate for jobs that involve significant amounts of time spent in concentration or mental effort.
What is a job?
The smallest components of work activities are called elements. One or more elements form a task, which is defined as a work activity performed to accomplish a specific objective or goal. The task usually begins with an action verb [e.g., requests costumer orders] and specifies what the person uses, tools, [e.g., use machine] and finally, specifies the objective to act [e.g., to register orders and compute bills].Work is essentially the performance of tasks. The tasks performed by an individual in an organization define that person’s position.
According to Handbook of Job Analysis a job is a “group of positions which are identical with respect to their major or significant tasks and sufficiently alike to justify their being covered by a single analysis” .In other words, a job is a cluster of positions that are explicitly designed by the organization to go together. I f jobs always corresponded to the way the organization designed them; there would be little need for job analysis.
If a group of jobs in different organizations are quite similar in the tasks performed they are called occupations. Many jobs in many different schools involve different types of teaching [math, science, technology, etc.], but, all of these jobs belong to the teaching occupation. The job family is the highest level of analysis which is a group of similar occupations. A career is a sequence of positions held by an individual employee over time. It could progress in an upward direction [promotion from an accountant to a manager] or in a downward direction.
WHY CONDUCT A JOB ANALYSIS?
Reducing Role Conflict and Ambiguity
One of the benefits of job analysis is that it can clarify and reduce the misunderstandings for the job position between incumbents and the organization. Job description helps here, the payoff reduce the stress, increase job satisfaction, and work motivation.
Design and Evaluation of Training
The content of the training program usually should reflect the content of the job. A job analysis can help in this regard in identifying the major content areas that should be covered in the course material.
Performance Appraisal and Criterion Development
The performance criteria that are used as the basis for evaluating the individual’s job performance should be derived from important dimensions of the job.
Job Design
Some jobs might need to be enriched to increase their motivational potential, while some others might need simplification because of inefficiencies. There are two job analysis techniques that are particularly effective: Multimethod Job Design Questionnaire [MJDQ- an assessment of whether there are aspects of the job that need simplification to increase efficiency] AND Job Diagnostic Survey [JDS- used to asses job components that appear to be crucial determinants of employee satisfaction and motivation].
Personnel selection
In deciding what to look for in the new hires, the first step is to carefully analyze the requirements of the job. After the knowledge, skills, abilities, and orientation [KSAO] are identified they can be used in screening the applicants. Job analysis is particularly important when a content validation strategy is used to develop and evaluate the selection procedures.
Wage and Salary Administration
Wages mostly depend on demand and supply factors, but by providing an assessment of the relative worth of jobs to the organization, job evaluation helps maintain some balance between internal equity and external competitiveness in the wage structure. Avoid discrimination against minorities, older employees, the disabled, women and other groups protected by law. Should this happen, the employer should be able to justify the relatedness of the personnel practices responsible for discrimination.
Compliance with Civil Rights Legislation
It is very important for job analysis to fit with laws and other regulations of the state. The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law in July 1990 and states “No covered entity shall discriminate against qualified individual with disability because of the disability of such individual in regard to job application procedures, the hiring, advancement, or discharge of employees, employee compensation, job training and other terms, conditions, and privileges of employment.”
WHAT IS MEASURED IN A JOB ANALYSIS?
Fleishman and Quaintance [1984] distinguished among 4 types of job analyses based on their content:
I. Behavior description: Lists most typical/frequent actions of the employee. It is used to generate the typical job description.
II. Behavior requirements: Lists task activities needed to perform a job.
III. Ability requirements: Unlike behavioral requirements, it focuses on KSAOs
I. Task characteristics : Treats the job as a set of stimuli external to the worker .Stimuli include the work load, the rate at which work is performed , the degree of job variety, the extent to which the person received feedback on his or her performance, the working conditions, and the kinds of hardware involved in the job.
Different approaches in regards to whether the analysis should be focused on:
Job-oriented - Elements that are specific to the job, the description of the work activities performed expressed in “job” terms , or
Worker oriented- General behavior and cognitive dimensions that can span different jobs, worker-oriented activities that refer to behaviors performed at work.
Another distinction is based on the organization of tasks, namely:
Chronological-for example, baking the bread should have an order of the tasks performed
Functional- a teacher organizes the work in the most functional way, prepares the lectures, grade the papers, supervises, hold the lectures etc.
HOW IS JOB ANALYSIS CONDUCTED?
Methods of Collecting Job Information
Observation is the method of watching the employee at work and recording the work activities as they are performed. Observation & recording interrupts one’s pace of work, so they are not very much effective.
Interviews are gathering info on cognitive components unable to collect from observations. An interview with a group of experts is called a technical conference or jury. The method of interviews is very time-consuming.
Self-report is when the employees get to describe what they do. It is useful for collecting large amount of information .It limits the respondent to provide additional information. The self-report questionnaire involves retrospective self-reports of work activities by incumbents, sometimes by checking off tasks performed from a list of tasks [the inventory checklist method]. They are among the most efficient and least cost ways of collecting information.
The best choice is to use a combination of all the methods.
Who Provides the Information?
There are several alternatives of sources of information:
Incumbents [currently performing the job] know more about the job than anyone else. Usually ‘decorate’ information and might not be very careful with important information. Those employees who are poor performers are no less accurate in how they respond to job analysis questionnaires than employees who are high performers.
Supervisors can tell what behavioral/cognitive actions seem to be working more/less. They might not give the complete picture.
It is important to use well-trained job analysts, who are well informed about the characteristics of the job/s.
How much Information is needed?
Some evidence suggests that less information than often thought may be needed in order to obtain accurate and reliable job ratings. There is undoubtedly some point of diminishing returns at which more information fails to improve the analysis. Hiring other human resource management practices are more defensible against claims of unfair discrimination if they are based on though job analysis by experts.
SPECIFIC METHODS OF JOB ANALYSIS
Behaviorally Oriented Techniques
Most of the efforts of I/O Psychology have been devoted to behavioral descriptions of jobs. The most important approach is the task inventory. Functional job analysis and the position analysis questionnaire describe work in terms of basic behavioral processes.
The Task Inventory
Three basic steps are included in constructing and administering the task inventory:
1. Through observing the work
2. Examining existing job descriptions
3. Interviewing experts, supervisors and incumbents
The inventory contains at least 100 task statements and could go as high as 400 or 500 statements. Previously tested with sample groups; the final version is administered to the incumbents, who check off the tasks that are performed by them.
The advantage of this method is that it provides info on a variety of quantitative ratings, such as: the time spent performing the task, difficulty of learning, importance, criticality, difficulty performing, and frequency. The disadvantage of this method is that it is criticized whether these different scales provide redundant information.
Functional Job Analysis
FJA is a standard technique that can be used to compare different jobs. Here, the analyst begins by generating task statements and then rates each task statements on its orientation and level with regard to data, people and things. Orientation is measured by allocating 100 % points across three functional areas to indicate how much of each is involved in the task .Level of each dimension[that can be high or low] is the degree of complexity with which a person engages in each function
The advantages of FJA are that it: allows very different jobs to be compared on the same general dimensions, simplicity in developing and applying it [requires less training & experience for the analyst]
The disadvantage is that it is far too general for many of the objectives.
The Position Analysis Questionnaire
The Position Analysis Questionnaire provides a more detailed behavioral description method than FJA .It contains 194 items called job elements. Most of the time it is organized in 6 divisions, following a stimulus-organism-response [SOR] model of human behavior
1. Input of information [once information is obtained, what must be done with it]
2. Meditational processes involved in this
3. Work output [acting on information and producing some service/product]
4. Interpersonal activities [negotiating, persuading, instructing, etc]
5. Work situation and job context [outdoor/indoor, noise, strained personal contacts, etc]
6. Miscellaneous aspects of work [schedule, pay, responsibilities, etc]
The advantages of PAQ are: it has proved valuable in research & practice [thus translated in many languages], wide range of applications, used in a variety of personnel functions including compensation, selection, training and vocational counseling, particularly useful in determining the abilities and traits required in a job.
Disadvantages of PAQ are: many items are irrelevant [“does not apply” option is checked often which can distort the results of the statistical analyses], a large portion of items are inappropriate for managerial and professional jobs [as it involves only use of machines and equipment], complexity of reading.
Division dimensions [dimensions of the position analysis questionnaire]
• Divisions 1: Information Input [e.g. perceptual interpretation, input from representational sources, use of various senses etc.]
• Division 2: Mental processes [e.g. Decision making, Information processing]
• Division 3: Work Output [e.g. Using machines/tools/equipment, general body versus sedentary activities, skilled/technical activities, physical coordination etc.]
• Division 4: Interpersonal Relations [e.g. Job-related communications, general personal contact, public/related personal contacts etc.]
• Division 5: Job context [e.g. Potentially stressful/unpleasant environment, personally demanding situations, potentially hazardous job situations ]
• Division 6: Other Job Characteristics [e.g. Regular vs. irregular work schedule, job-demanding responsibilities, structured versus unstructured job activities etc.]
Techniques Focused on Requirements
Unlike PAQ, FJA, and task inventory that describe jobs in terms of the activities that are performed, there are two techniques that are focused on identifying the crucial components of the work: critical indent technique and the Ability Requirements Scales.
Critical Incident Technique
It is most frequently employed behavioral requirement technique .Employees are asked to think of a specific incident involving an example of extremely effective or extremely ineffective performance.
Because extreme behaviors are more easily remembered and described than average behaviors. Afterwards, dimensions are of performance are sorted into piles; each pile representing a critical dimension of job performance
Advantages of critical incident technique: it is the best at determining crucial factors of the job.
Disadvantages of critical incident technique: dimension/s may be crucial to performance but may occur rarely. Potential problem also may be the tendency to attribute events in the job to the traits of the person, confusion between the personality and behaviors which depend on the wording of the questions.
Ability requirements Scales
This is a more structured approach. It is derived from extensive research and includes not only psychomotor and physical abilities, but also cognitive abilities. A scale was developed for each of these abilities to allow rating of the extent to which each ability is required in a task. An anchor is the behavior used to represent a numerical scale value [ex. Lift a 70lb.box versus lift a package of bond paper].
Traits rated in Ability Requirements Scale [ARS][some of them]:
- Oral comprehension
- Written comprehension
- Oral expression
- Written expression
- Fluency of ideas
- Originality
- Memorization
- Problem sensitivity, etc.
Eclectic Techniques
Eclectic techniques are methods that go even farther in the direction of using diverse work content in job analysis [behavior description, behavior requirements, trait requirements and task characteristics].
The Multimethod Job Design Questionnaire was designed to reflect job characteristics, mechanistic, biological, and perceptual/motor approaches to describe jobs. Items in the questionnaire deal with factors as diverse as the autonomy allowed in the job, degree of task specialization, noise, and workplace lightning.
U.S. Employment Service describes the jobs in terms of five categories of information:
1. work functions- what the worker does in relation to data ,people, and things
2. work fields- the methodologies and techniques employed
3. MTFWA- the machines ,tools equipment, and work aids used
4. MPSMS- the materials, products, subject matter, or services which result
5. Worker traits- the traits required of the worker.
Besides to job rating on the each of the five content areas, the job analyst provides several open-ended descriptions os such things as the job duties, primary tasks involved in the job, vocational preparation required, relation to other jobs and workers, and materials and products.
JOB EVALUATION AS THE BASIS FOR WAGE AND SALARY ADMINISTRATION
Job evaluation is a a type of job analysis used to judge the relative worth of jobs in an organization for the purpose of setting fair & equitable compensation rates. It is important to note that jobs [not individuals] are rated with these procedures. There are four primary means of job evaluation: Ranking, Classification, Factor comparison, Point systems .In order to distinguish them it is good to look if they evaluate the job as a whole or evaluate on the basis of separate dimensions of the job, or the distinction between job evaluation procedures that evaluate the job against other jobs or against absolute standard.
Ranking
Ranking is the simplest procedure. It involves ordering a group of jobs on the basis of their relative worth from the highest valued jobs to the least valued jobs. This is practical for small organizations, but it is unrealistic appropriate for large corporations.
Classification
Classification is judging the whole job against some absolute standard. There exist a series of classes [grades] and job clustered in a class are considered substantively similar in their worth to the organization. The most widely used classification procedure is General Schedule [GS] used by the U.S Office of Personnel Management and is most widely classified in 18 grades.
Factor Comparison
It involves evaluating a job on several dimensions called compensable factors .Jobs are compared with other jobs on each comparable factor. Steps involved are:
1. Conduct job analysis- all jobs are analyzed on this set of factors: mental requirements, skill requirements, physical demands, responsibility, and working conditions.
2. Select benchmark jobs- after all job are analyzed, 15-20 of them are chosen according to their values along factors and appropriate payment.
3. Rank the benchmark jobs on each factor- for each factor, the benchmarked jobs are next ranked from those that are highest to those that are lowest.
4. Distribute existing wage of benchmark jobs across factors-the current wage of each is divided in order to reflect the pay effects of various factors.
5. Application of the system- non-benchmark jobs are evaluated one factor at a time on the basis of the dollar value believed most appropriate.
Point System
Point system is the most frequently used procedure; it involves evaluating jobs a factor at a time on an absolute rating scale. Specific factors used depend on the particular system. Number of factors can range from 1 to 20 or more. Time span of discretion is focused on the time lag between an incumbent’s actions and when the consequences of these actions become known. When the [TSD] is long the job desires higher wages and vice versa. Most widely used point systems is the Hay Guide Chart Profile Method [Hay & Purves, 1954] evaluates jobs against 3 factors:
· Know-how – refers to the sum total to every kind of skill, however acquired, required for acceptable performance.
· Problem solving- refers to original ,”self-starting” thinking required in the job for analyzing, evaluating, creating, reasoning, arriving at and making conclusions.
· Accountability – refers to answerability for action and for the consequences thereof.
Another point system was developed by National Electric Manufacturers Association [NEMA] that uses an 11 factor system grouped into four general areas: skills, effort, responsibility, and job conditions. The rating scale is designed to measure each factor, with the scale values reflecting the relative weight of the factor.
Establishing the Pay Structure
After evaluating jobs, next step is to assign wages .Employer develops a pay policy line in order to maintain internal equity; wherever jobs deviate from the line, the wage may need to be changed.
Discrepancy can be corrected by adding or deleting job evaluation points to bring things back in line.
Example: Gender bias in pay structure, common pay differences between women and men.
The Policy-Capturing Approach
With this method, jobs are analyzed on general dimensions with a method such as PAQ. Using multiple regression a statistical equation is generated that can be used to predict current salaries from job dimensions. The equation could be used to set the salaries for other jobs in the future. Policy capturing applies more to lower level jobs than to professional and managerial jobs.
Which is the best Method?
Only few differences were found in accuracy of different job evaluation methods, but compensation specialists liked the hybrid method [a combined method between traditional and policy-capturing approaches] better than others.
Comparable Worth Controversy
Job analysis and evaluation procedures have focused in raging controversy over how to reduce the discrepancies between men and women in their pay. In US gender gap between gender payments widens more as women age.
Origins of the Gender Gap in Wages: The Case of Secretarial work
The data indicate that women tend to be less paid than men and part of the reason is the tendency of jobs to become sex-typed. The sex-typing of work appears to result from a complex interplay of technological, organizational, and demographic forces.
Very early in history men used to be the clerk in a company .Bu t later as the typewriter was introduced there was a higher need for more people to have this job and a very large number of women were trained for this since they were a cheap labor force. In 1870 only 4.5% of stenographers and typist were women, while in 1930 around 95.4% were women in these positions. The duties of secretary depended very much on the relationship of the secretary and the boss, so it became stereotyped position that required stereotypic feminine attributes.
The Concept of Comparable Worth
According to Equal Pay Act Law of 1963, employers are prohibited from paying women less than men if they perform work that is essentially equal; in the content of the job on the dimensions of skill, responsibility, effort, and working conditions. This is criticized for “equal content” which is far too stringent tom be effective tool. A new doctrine of fairness states that women should be paid the same if they perform work of comparable worth. This means evaluating jobs that provide comparisons on broad dimensions such as PAQ, functional job analysis, and point systems of job evaluations. Basic principle of this doctrine is: if an executive secretary’s job involves similar behavioral processes and demands as a manager’s job, then the secretary should be paid same despite the obvious differences in the content of jobs.
Biases in Job Evaluation
It is difficult to compare the wages of men and women while holding the content of the work constant, because of the extreme sex separation and of so many occupations. Experiments have failed to reveal dramatic differences in the evaluation of jobs as a function of the sex of the incumbent. In the experiment done by Schwab and Grams [1985] no differences were found as a function of the sex of the incumbents; however the pay of the job was a very important factor in the ratings given.