Job Redesign and Rewards for Advertising Art Directors
This paper examines job redesign and workplace reward strategies as applied to an advertising art director working at an advertising agency. It outlines the key responsibilities of the role, the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that drive creative professionals, and the reward structures — including salary, bonuses, and profit-sharing — that organizations use to recognize performance and behavior. The paper also discusses how goals are set at both the project and individual level, and proposes improvements centered on team-based evaluation, collaborative workspace design, and a shift away from input-specific performance metrics toward holistic assessments of creative contribution.
- Job Components and Responsibilities of an Advertising Art Director: Role overview, creative duties, and intrinsic motivations
- Company-Wide Reward Structures: Salary, bonuses, behaviors, and non-monetary perks
- How Goals Are Set: Project benchmarks and individual performance goals
- Potential for Improvement Through Job Redesign: Team-based rewards, workspace design, and redesign proposal
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds abstract management concepts — such as performance evaluation and goal-setting — in a specific, concrete professional role, making the analysis both focused and practical.
- It balances intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors, acknowledging that creative employees respond differently to reward systems than production or sales workers.
- The Google benefits example is used effectively as a real-world benchmark, illustrating how leading organizations structure non-monetary rewards to boost retention and productivity.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates applied organizational analysis: it takes theoretical frameworks from management literature (goal-setting theory, performance-behavior reward distinctions, team dynamics) and applies them directly to a specific job role. This technique — moving from concept to application within a single case — is characteristic of well-structured business and management papers at the undergraduate level.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a description of the advertising art director role and its inherent creative demands, then moves through company-wide reward structures, goal-setting practices, and finally a reform proposal centered on team-based redesign. Each section builds logically on the previous one, culminating in a recommendation grounded in the role's specific characteristics.
Job Components and Responsibilities of an Advertising Art Director
Employees whose work focuses on designing advertising content often have a greater degree of leeway in governing their day than other types of employees. Advertising professionals are "creatives," meaning that their output is more subjective in its value than, say, a factory employee who must produce a set quantity of a particular product per day, or an accounting professional who must perform an audit. An advertising art director's primary role is serving the client. "An art director usually works alongside a copywriter to form a 'creative team.' Traditionally, the copywriter produces the words to go with the visuals created by the art director" (Advertising art director, 2014, AGCAS). Working closely with the client from the outset to understand project needs, storyboarding an advertisement, and working on location during the production of an advertisement are all core components of the art director's role.
In general, a great deal of intrinsic motivation — or "love of the job" — is assumed: most persons in advertising take considerable personal pride in delivering a high-quality product. Although most major companies offer competitive salaries to art directors, they are traditionally not the highest-paid professionals in the organization, at least in part because the excitement of generating an imaginative product is considered one of the inherent pleasures and rewards of the work. Art directors are not hired on the basis of education and past experience alone; they must also exhibit enthusiasm and embody the ethos of the advertising content the company strives to produce. Advertising is never a fungible or interchangeable product — every piece of advertising is unique, and every advertising agency works to cultivate a distinctive style.
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