A Rubber Recycling Plant Employed 150 Unskilled and Relatively Low-Paid

Essay

A rubber recycling plant employed 150 unskilled and relatively low-paid production employees. Although employees were unhappy about their pay levels as well as noise and heat in the plant, most had high seniority because there were many other employment opportunities in the community. To motivate the workforce, the new plant manager decided to enrich the production jobs by giving
them a wider variety of tasks to perform and giving them more autonomy regarding when they performed those tasks. However, rather than increase job performance, the changes resulted in more complaints from employees, higher absenteeism due to stress and a slight increase in turnover.
Based on your knowledge of job design, explain why these results may have occurred.