Functional Job Analysis

A Foundation for Human Resources Management

Sidney A. Fine, Steven F. Cronshaw

• Editore: Psychology Press
• Anno: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781135694067
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Psicología
• Categoria: Historia y teoría en psicología

This book was written to address the need for timely, thorough, practical, and defensible job analysis for HR managers. Under continuing development over the past 50 years, Functional Job Analysis (FJA) is acknowledged by major texts in HR and industrial/organizational psychology as one of the premier methods of job analysis used by leading-edge organizations in the private and public sectors. It is unique among job analysis methods in having its own in-depth theoretical grounding within a systems framework. In addition to providing a methodology for analyzing jobs, it offers a rich model and vocabulary for communicating about the competencies (skills) contributing to work success and about the design of the work organization through which those competencies are expressed. FJA is the right theory and methodology for future work in an increasingly competitive global economy. This book is the authoritative source describing how FJA can encourage and support an ongoing dialogue between workers and management as they jointly pursue total quality, worker growth, and organization performance. It is a flexible tool, fully recognizing the rapid changes impacting today's organizations. It is a comprehensive tool, leading to an in-depth understanding of work, its results, and its improvement in a unique organization context. It is a humane tool, viewing workers in light of their full potential and capacity for positive growth. With FJA, workers and managers can work more constructively together in a wholesome and productive work relationship.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Does HRM have a Future?

It has become a cliché that we live in a time of tumultuous and rapid change. And although the winds of change can be exhilarating, many of us feel the need for an anchor to keep from capsizing. Departments of HRM are faced with such a possibility and such a need. Stewart (1996) stated in a Fortune article:

Nearly every function of this department (human resources) can be performed more expertly for less by others. Chances are its leaders are unable to describe their contribution to value added except in trendy, unquantifiable, and wannabe terms…. Why not blow the sucker up? (p. 105)

He reported on a study by the Corporate Leadership Council of Washington, DC, that concluded that four big dollops of human resource (HR) work have ”significant potential to outsource fully: benefits design and administration; information systems and record keeping; employer services such as retirement counseling, outplacement, and relocation; and health and safety (workers compensation, wellness programs, drug testing, and OSHA compliance).” He continued:

Why stop there? A slew of other traditional HR functions can also be outsourced or devolved from HR to the line. Take recruiting. Everywhere I’ve worked where I had to hire people, the rule of thumb among managers was to involve HR as little as possible in the process. When HR professionals are themselves looking for work, two thirds of the time they find it by networking or using search firms (a form of outsourcing) according to a survey of the HR job market by Manchester Partners International, a Philadelpia based coalition of outplacement and executive coaching consultants, (pp. 105-106)

Stewart quoted Vikesh Mahendroo, vice president of William M. Mercer, the HR consulting firm, as saying, ”Human capital management has become important enough that it is an acceptable career path for an up-and-comer. However, many people doing the work now can’t cut it in the HR of the future” (pp. 105-106).

Although Stewart may be caught up in the drive of the past 10 years for downsizing and reengineering, we are inclined to take him seriously. What he has to say is not very encouraging for the existing HR bureaucracy. We know from the downsizing already taking place that Stewart’s observations are not academic or mere wishful thinking. The confrontational ideas he expresses are already being implemented. Nucor, the steel giant with 6,000 employees, runs HR with a headquarters staff of three people, a secretary and two other employees reporting to plant general managers, not to corporate managers. HR is, in short, a line function.

The HR Discipline not the HR Department is the Issue

Is this the harbinger of the future—HR administrative detail outsourced, and staffing, training, performance monitoring, and design of job and team functions shifted to line activity?

Possibly. However, the continuance of the HR department is not the issue. The issue is whether the discipline of HR, its principles and practices, has a role to play in achieving profitable productivity, effective organizations, and growing, satisfied workforces.

This issue looms large in these turbulent times, cliché or not. These days few organizations remain unaffected by globalization and international competition for markets and resources. Private enterprises operating within the confines of a single country must deal with offshore competitors that take advantage of relaxed tariff rules. Companies seeking markets in other countries must adapt to local conditions and face competition from firms based in the home countries. Even governments and nonprofit agencies providing services without any direct competitors in the boundaries of a single country have felt the need to restructure in response to the trend in the private sector for flatter organization structures and greater accountability for customer-oriented delivery of goods and services.

The global marketplace has placed a special premium on organizations to have skilled and adaptable workforces in order to survive and compete successfully. Organizations must be especially sharp in their recruitment and training of employees who work willingly with management in achieving goals that are often mutually set. How will this be done? Who will do this?

In response to these developments, the management of private sector companies has adopted various means to deal successfully with the uncertain environments brought about by global competition, including the following:

• a retreat from hierarchical, bureaucratic organization structures toward flatter organization structures to increase response flexibility.
• increased worker participation and autonomy, particularly on the shop floor, thereby drawing more heavily on worker know-how.
• computerization of information flow, eliminating bottlenecks frequently on middle management levels.
• computerization of design and production to meet the need for greater precision and adaptability in production processes.
• increased mergers and acquisitions among companies both within countries and across national lines to consolidate operations, reduce overhead by eliminating large portions of their workforce, and increase profitability.
• intensification of responsive customer-oriented systems requiring a high degree of adaptability to changing market conditions.
• intensification of the demand by industry that governments do more to upgrade their educational and training resources and equip workers with the skills required by an increasingly competitive world economy.

Can it be Stewart is unaware of the significant role played by practitioners of the HR discipline in promoting flatter organization structures, increased worker participation and autonomy, and a more flexible approach to the use of worker skills (e.g., as stated by Petersen and Hillkirk in A better idea)? When HR personnel have the opportunity to implement progressive notions that have emerged from their research and practice, they add significant value to the productivity and profitability of their organizations.

HRM has a wealth of resources to draw on in the thinking and writing of MacGregor and Argyris, Drucker and Peters, Bennis and Maslow, among others, to meet the challenges of globalization. These thinkers set forth a central theme: The worker needs to be viewed as a whole person and not as an adjunct to a machine. Only with this approach can the full potential and adaptability of the workers be tapped.

FJA, in development during the last 40 years, picks up on this theme. Its methods systematically and consistently distinguish between what gets done and what workers do to get it done task by task. FJA casts a clear light on tasks that contribute to productivity and those that are superfluous. It does so by documenting the knowledges, skills, and abilities (KSA) required to perform the tasks and how the tasks mesh with one another to achieve the outputs. FJA thus adds value to informed decision making and communication wherever a job’s content and context figure prominently into personnel operations.

FJA

The conceptual ideas that are referred to as FJA were developed during the years from 1950 to 1960 at the U.S. Employment Service and served as the guiding hypotheses for research on a new occupational classification system for the Dictionary of occupational titles 1965. It is still in effect today, more than 30 years later.

During the 1960s, the concepts were further refined and developed into a job analysis tool. This tool has been used to analyze hundreds of jobs at every level of skill in government, nonprofit organizations, and private industry. The following core propositions of the FJA approach give the reader an initial sense of why the information provided by FJA can serve as a foundation for HRM in the 21st century. These core propositions are:

• People Are Whole Persons—People involved in any activity (learning, playing, working) are always functioning as whole persons, instrumentally (actively performing a task) and latently (adapting to the situation in which the task occurs). Content and contextual variables are always involved simultaneously. In order to get a true picture of what is going on, it is imperative to describe performance holistically. (Perhaps the reader is inclined to say, ”So what else is new?” Too often the inclination of professionals has been to use tests that fractionate performance and individual qualifications.)

• Tasks Rather Than fobs Are Basic Units of Work—FJA starts with the task rather than the job as the center of attention. A task can and needs to connect what a worker does (behavior) and what gets done (result). A task is more stable than a job, which is made up of several to many tasks— all variable as to scope, difficulty, and content. Job titles are especially misleading.

• The Objects of Work Are TDP—TDP make up the universe of objects of work. Things are all tangible materials. Data are information and ideas. People includes persons and live animals with which workers interact.

• Functional Skills Denote Work Behaviors in Relation to TDP, Persons Function in Relation to Things Physically, to Data Mentally, and to People Inter- personally—The names of these functional relationships are unique to each category. The functional relationships are defined as functional skills and occur in behavioral hierarchies from simple to complex.

• Specific Content Skills Denote KSA Acquired in Particular Job-Worker Situations—Workers, when applying functional skills to TDP objects in job-worker situations, acquire specific knowledges to efficiently and effectively attain specified performance standards. These specific knowledges (and associated know-how) constitute a worker’s specific content skills.

• Tasks Are Basic Modules of a Work-Doing System—The linkage of behaviors (functions), objects (TDP), and results produces tasks that are basic modules of the internal technology of a work-doing system. The system has three interacting components: Work Organization, Worker, and Work. A systems approach is applied to evaluate the linkages among tasks, their overall contribution to output, and the value they add to the productivity of a work organization.

• A Systems Approach Involves Both Content and Context—A systems approach is not only sensitive to the workings of the internal technology of a work-doing system but also to the variables in the environment that can impact on its functioning. The functional and specific content skills comprehend a worker’s instrumental behavior focused on producing the organization’s outputs. They do not include the latent skills required to deal with the work organization’s context. These latent skills are the adaptive skills—those competencies that individuals need to manage themselves in relation to conformity and change in their environment. They are largely invisible willingnesses that activate functional and specific content skills, contribute to whole-person functioning, and play a central role in the quality of performance.

• A Major Adaptive Skill Is How a Person Relates to the Instructional Mix of Prescription and Discretion—Implicit in every task, in every connection between a behavior and a result, is an instruction involving some combination of prescription and discretion. Prescription and discretion are two inversely related continua. The more complex the behavior, the more discretion it involves in relation to prescription; the simpler the behavior, the more prescription it involves in relation to discretion.

• Whole-Person Functioning Involves the Three Kinds of Skills Simultaneously—All three kinds of skills—functional, specific content, and adaptive —come into play simultaneously in the performance of any job-worker situation. This conceptual framework comprehends the totality of human work performance.

These core propositions describe information that is not likely to be forthcoming from job analysis checklists containing predigested snippets of job data. In no way can checklists indicate how workers engage the problems they face in their work and improvise and innovate to go beyond their training and specified procedures to get work done. This kind of information needs to be obtained directly from the workers.

The purpose of this book is to describe and demonstrate how FJA implements these core propositions, gathers the information in structured focus groups, and applies the information in personnel operations.

The Organization of the Book

In this book, we describe both the theory and application of FJA. To accomplish this, the book is organized into three major parts. In Part I, which spans chapters 2 to 6, the theory and concepts underlying FJA are discussed in detail. Particular emphasis is given to the holistic, unifying nature of FJA. In Part II, consisting of chapters 7 to 9, the FJA process is described in detail including the generation of the task bank by the worker focus group and the subsequent reception of that information by management. Special attention is given to the use of FJA in total quality management (TQM). In Part III, comprised of chapters 10 to 18, 30 years of FJA applications are described. These applications cover a wide range of interventions familiar to HR managers, including personnel selection, training curriculum design, job design, and career development. All of these applications flow naturally from the FJA theory explained in Part I and the methodology described in Part II. To more fully detail the content of this book, a synopses of the chapters follows.

In chapter 2, the systems concept for understanding work is explained. In FJA, the work-doing system is comprised of three subsystems (Work, Worker, and Work Organization) focused on a common purpose: productivity, efficiency/effectiveness, and worker growth. The discussion in chapter 2 shows how the HR manager can assist the organization to achieve the respective purposes of the three subsystems. When these are in balance in an organization, it can be maximally competitive.

In chapter 3, we examine the Work Organization subsystem. A full understanding of the Work Organization is essential to an informed application of FJA. We discuss the start-up of work-doing systems by progenitors —sometimes called entrepreneurs or charismatic leaders—and how they transform a perceived need in society and their personal values to fulfil a purpose. We show how, in order to achieve the purpose, the progenitor must break the purpose down into goals (intermediate term) and objectives (short term). Finally, we discuss the inherent rivalry of the two simultaneous goals of the work organization—to fulfil its mission and to maintain itself—and the impact this rivalry has on HRM.

In chapter 4, we examine the second component of the work system, the Worker. The HR manager must recognize and acknowledge workers’ capacities, education, training, experience, interests, and cultural background so they can be most effectively integrated with organizational and technological needs to...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Learning and Understanding the FJA Model
• PART II Generating the FJA Data
• PART III Using FJA in HRM Applications
• Appendix A FJA Scales
• Appendix B Selecting Functional Job Analysts
• Appendix C Training and Accrediting Functional Job Analysts
• Appendix D FJA Task Bank Editing Manual
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index