Jasmine runs a clothing store, and she's noticed that her employees don't seem to have a deep sense of responsibility about their jobs. How can she change this situation?

Solution

Responsibility is derived from autonomy, as in the job provides substantial freedom, independence and discretion to the individual in scheduling the work and in determining the procedures to be used in carrying it out). As such, giving more autonomy to the employees could help Jasmine to change the current situation at the job. This phenomenon was described by the Hackman’s Job Characteristics Model. The model is based on the idea that the task itself is key to employee motivation. The theory was developed in the 1970s and is composed of five core job characteristics. The five characteristics are skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback from the job. The characteristics are combined with three psychological states to determine the personal and work outcome (job satisfaction, absenteeism, work motivation, etc.). The three psychological states are meaningfulness, responsibility for outcomes and knowledge of actual results of the work. The five core job characteristics can be combined to form a motivating potential score (MPS) for a job, which can be used as an index of how likely a job is to affect an employee's attitudes and behaviors. MSP = [(skill variety + task identity + task significance)/3] x  autonomy x feedback