The short video below explains the Hackman & Oldham model, with supporting study notes underneath.

What motivates you at work? Are financial rewards the most important or do non-financial factors such as job satisfaction play an important role too?

Hackman & Oldham’s job characteristics model is based on the belief that the TASK itself is key to employee motivation.

Specifically, a boring and monotonous job stifles motivation to perform well, whereas a challenging job enhances motivation. Variety, autonomy and decision authority are three ways of adding challenge to a job. Job enrichment and job rotation are the two ways of adding variety and challenge.

Their model argues that it is possible to design jobs that add to employee motivation.

Hackman & Oldham suggested that there are five job characteristics that can be studied to help predict job satisfaction:

Skill variety

• How many different skills and talents does the job require of a person?
• Are they asked to do a lot of different things, or is it a monotonous, repetitive job?
• It seems reasonable to conclude that a job that involves a variety of activities and perhaps stretches an employee to develop his / her skills is more likely to be motivating than menial and monotonous work each day

Task identity

• Is there a clearly defined beginning, middle and end to a given task?
• Does a worker know what he or she is supposed to do, and when he or she is successfully completed the task?
• There is no better feeling at work of having completed a task successfully - a clearly-defined task is more likely to create opportunities for employees to enjoy the positive feelings of achievement

Task significance

• Does the job have “a substantial impact?
• Will it matter to people, either within the organisation or to society?
• Is this job/given task meaningful?
• It can be pretty de-motivating at work if you feel your work has little or no "meaning" or significance. You'd be forgiven for wondering why you bother doing it!

Autonomy

• How much freedom does an individual have to accomplish his or her tasks?
• Does this freedom includes the ability to schedule work as well as figuring out how to get the tasks done?

Job feedback

• Is an employee kept in the loop about their performance?
• Are they being told when they are doing well and when they are not?