Imagine that you are a manager at Applebee’s, a restaurant chain. Turnover is always a challenge with restaurant employees, and yours are no different. Your restaurant’s turnover rate is a little above the company average, and you would like to improve it. You believe that having better trained and more experienced servers will help you to decrease staffing costs and improve customer service and sales. Fortunately, you have a lot of control over how your restaurant’s jobs are designed and believe that redesigning the work might improve employees’ motivation, absenteeism, and turnover. You recently administered a survey assessing your employees’ job satisfaction, motivation, and perceptions about their jobs at Applebee’s that confirmed your suspicions. Employees provided a lot of honest information and additional comments that you think will be useful in restructuring your stores based on the job characteristics theory.

There are two questions in all. The answer to question 1 is D;

Whilst the answer to the second question is A.

Explanation:

The question  speaks to the Job Characteristic Theory of Work Design. Job Characteristics Theory of Work Design is "a set of implementing principles for enriching jobs in organizational settings”

The theory posits that five core job characteristics should prompt three critical psychological states, which lead to many favorable personal and work outcomes. The moderators Growth Need Strength, Knowledge and Skill, and Context Satisfaction should moderate the links between the job characteristics and the psychological states, and the psychological states and the outcomes

These job characteristics are:

Skill Variety: This answers the question about how many skills are required to do a job. The more the number of skills required, the likelihood of the employee being more satisfied with their job

Task Identity: this answers the question about whether or not the contribution of the task to the overall growth of the organization is recognizable

Task Significance: This answer the question about whether or not the job itself has meaningful impact on others. A jobholder will be happier (according to the theory) to hold and execute a task with a seemingly higher purpose and or impact on other people.

Autonomy: This speaks to whether or not the job provides the employee with significant freedom, independence, and discretion to plan out the work and determine the procedures in the job. For highly autonomous jobs the outcomes of the work depend on the employees own efforts, initiatives, and decisions; rather than on the instructions from a line manager or a procedural manual. The level of greater responsibility experienced is directly proportional to the level of autonomy. That if an employee would prefer to be the architect of their success or failure.

Feedback: This speaks to the whether or not or the extent to which the worker has knowledge of results.

This is clear, specific, detailed, actionable information about the effectiveness of his or her job performance. When workers receive clear, actionable information about their work performance, they have better overall knowledge of the effect of their work activities, and what specific actions they need to take (if any) to improve their productivity

Recall that one of the moderators which moderates the links between job characteristics  and psychogical states and job outcomes is Growth Need Strength.

Growth Need Strength (GNS) is defined as:

the strength of a person's need for personal accomplishment, learning, and development”.

The psychological states affected by GNS according to the theory  and which in turn affect job performance are:

Experienced Meaningfulness of the Work: The degree to which the jobholder experiences the work as intrinsically meaningful and can present his or her value to other people and/or the external environment.

Experienced Responsibility for Outcome of the Work: The degree to which the worker feels he or she is accountable and responsible for the results of the work.

Knowledge of Results of the Work Activities: The degree to which the jobholder knows how well he or she is performing.

Given the above background, if the results of the survey shows that Growth needs strengths is consistently high, then it means that as a manager at Applebee restaurant chain, the interventions to the core job characteristics are likely to be effective.

With regard to the Second Question:

If  the staff feel that they have no control over how they do their jobs, which in turn makes them feel unable to provide the best customer service that they can then the following from the explanation above the job redesign will look at the psychological state that speaks to

D) Experienced meaningfulness of the work

Cheers!

51% were unhappy, i think .   ; )