¶ … human resources and psychology is job satisfaction. Not surprisingly, people have noted that higher levels of job satisfaction are linked to improved job performance. Hackman and Oldham were some of the first researchers to really highlight the relationship between job characteristics and job satisfaction. "Their Job Characteristics Model (JCM) argued that, essentially, enriched or complex jobs are associated with increased job satisfaction, motivation, and work performance. More specifically, they assumed that five core job characteristics…influence three critical psychological states…which in turn affect work outcomes (Fried & Ferris, 1987). The five core job characteristics include skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback from job (Fried & Ferris, 1987). The three critical psychological states include the experienced meaningfulness of the work, the experienced responsibility for outcomes of the work, and knowledge of the actual results of the work activities (Fried & Ferris, 1987). The work outcomes that are impacted by the job characteristics and psychological states include internal work motivation, growth satisfaction, overall job satisfaction, work effectiveness, and absenteeism (Fried & Ferris, 1987). While other researchers have developed models to measure job satisfaction and motivation, there has been surprisingly little research in the area. The reality is that few of the job satisfaction models make a strong link between job characteristics and job satisfaction. Furthermore, "only the job characteristic model of Hackman and Oldham explicitly describes five work factors relevant to job satisfaction: variety in skills; task identification; task meaningfulness; autonomy; and feedback" (van Saane et al., 2003).

JCM

The JCM asks a series of 23 questions, aimed at determining the characteristics of various jobs. It measures five different job characteristics: skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and job feedback (Cengage, 2010). Many of the questions focused on my perceptions about the responsibility I had for the job, whether I was involved in the completion...

Questions were asked in different manner, wish me selecting an answer from 1 (very nondescriptive) to 5 (very descriptive).
My score on the JCM

For this inventory, I answered the questions based upon my job as a customer service representative at a large charitable organization. My score for skill variety was 12/5, my score for task identity was 5, my score for task significance was 5, my score for autonomy was 6/4 and my score for feedback was 26/6. Looking at those results, one can see that I did not find my job to have a significant amount of variety, nor did I feel as if I could use all of my skills to do the job. However, my high scores for task identity and task significance showed that I felt that the job was both important to the company and important to the consumers that I was serving. One of the best features of my job, which I have noticed differs from other customer-service positions, is that all of the customer-service representatives in the call center had full authority to settle a call, without having to resort to finding a manager. However, the job description was not very flexible, and, while feedback was continuous, it did not actually give an employee a means of moving upward in the company.

My total motivating potential score (MPS) was obtained by combining the skill variety, take identity, and task significance scores, then dividing those by 3 (in other words, finding the average of them), then multiplying that number by the autonomy and feedback scores (Cengage, 2010). The total motivating potential score was 26.86 in a range from 1 to 150. Obviously, this appears to be at the low end of the possible score range, though, upon comparing that number with the results obtained by some classmates, it does seem to be characteristic of the type of low-end, entry-level positions that are typically filled by high-school or college-aged students.

I did feel that the JCM gave a realistic view of my job's motivating potential.…