Post #3528669

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Rearranging the furniture Context: The organisation wants to improve engagement. HR runs a job design initiative. Roles are reviewed and enriched: more variety, clearer ownership, better learning opportunities, stronger feedback loops. Individual development plans are updated. Some people respond well. The numbers improve slightly. A few years later, the same initiative runs again under a different name. The underlying dynamic has not changed. People are still doing work defined by someone else, in structures designed by someone else, toward goals set by someone else. The enrichment made the cage more comfortable. The cage is still there. OST explains: This is not a new experiment. The Norwegian Industrial Democracy Programme in the 1960s, in which Fred Emery played a central role, tested exactly this. Job enrichment worked in some contexts, particularly where the technology and task structure allowed individual roles to be redesigned meaningfully. But it consistently produced weaker results than the alternative: groups that collectively designed their own work. The critical distinction is not how much autonomy a person is given. It is who defines the work in the first place. In job enrichment, management or HR redesigns the individual role. The person receives a better-designed job. In a self-managing team as understood in OST, the group designs its own work, its own coordination, its own goals. Nobody hands it down. The six psychological requirements for productive work, things like genuine learning, real decision-making, and meaningful social support, can be partially addressed by enriching individual jobs. They are fully addressed only when the group owns the design of its work. Job enrichment is a DP1 solution applied to a DP1 problem. It improves the parts without changing the system. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile