Job Enlargement: Definition, Benefits, and Modern-day Examples

Job enlargement enhances roles by adding new responsibilities, increasing task variety and motivation. It outlines advantages such as increased skills and autonomy, alongside potential drawbacks like reduced efficiency.

By Brad Nakase, Attorney

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Table of Contents

1. What does job enlargement mean?

2. The benefits of job enlargement

3. Job enlargement disadvantages

4. Example of job enlargement

5. To sum up

What does job enlargement mean?

Arguably, one of the most familiar methods to add variation to a task is to expand it. This essay will define job enlargement, go over its advantages and disadvantages, and conclude with several examples of job enlargement in the age of the internet that demonstrate its relevance in the fast-paced world of today.

Job enlargement adds new responsibilities to an existing position at the same level. This implies that an individual’s current employment will involve more varied tasks. For instance, a worker who will now oversee her own planning and her manager’s previous duties.

In addition to job enrichment, job cycling, and job simplification, job enlargement is a crucial job redesign strategy.

Work enrichment and enlargement are frequently misunderstood. But there’s a noticeable distinction. The goal of job enlargement is to increase the scope of one’s work in order to increase motivation. The method of adding stimuli to current occupations is referred to as job enrichment.

This suggests that while job enrichment can be achieved through job enlargement, not all job enrichment activities fall under this category. We’ll go into more detail about this later.

One of the main features of job enlargement is the horizontal expansion of the job’s scope. Because of this, it is also referred to as horizontal expansion and stands in contrast to specialization. A division of labor is produced by specialization, where people carry out particular activities. Here, it is assumed that the person will effectively carry out these duties. Expanding jobs has the opposite result. This brings up the pros and cons of job enlargement.

The benefits of job enlargement

The 1960s and 1970s saw a rise in popularity for job enlargement. People began to focus more on what made a job motivating during that period as they became aware of how boring and extremely unsatisfying old mass production assembly lines were to work at.

There are several benefits to increasing the number of highly specialized jobs:

Expanding the range of available activities: Job expansion is essentially the process of giving current roles more responsibilities. As a result, there is a greater variety of activities in the job.

Minimizes repetition: The increased variety of activities reduces monotony. People don’t spend nine hours straight performing the same, extremely specialized work thirty times an hour. Rather, they are more involved from beginning to end, overseeing an automated assembly line or even bringing a single product through several stages of manufacturing.

Teaches a range of skills and promotes professional development: Training is needed for new job duties, and experience-building assistance is also needed. Employees learn new skills from this, which helps with professional advancement.

Get paid more: Increased responsibility in a role frequently translates into higher pay. Increased pay is a particular perk for the worker.

Increases responsibility, accountability, and autonomy: There are several motivating elements that result from the added obligations. Now that they are in charge of several connected tasks, they have more control over how they carry out their work, which increases their autonomy. Furthermore, because they have greater ownership and accountability due to their increased involvement with a single service or product, they are also more responsible for errors and the quality of their output (as opposed to when they were specialized).

In conclusion, employment expansion can give each worker greater diversity, greater control over their work, and a more fulfilling experience at work.

Job enlargement disadvantages

There are a lot of disadvantages to job enlargement as well. A wave of specialization in the early 1900s made work dull and boring for a number of reasons, the most significant of which was an increase in productivity and profit.

The Ford Motor Company is among the most well-known instances. The corporation was a market leader due to the highly specialized assembly line it established at its factories. Because of this, the business was able to provide employees with extra time off and a substantially higher minimum wage.

Reduced efficiency: Less specialization results from job enlargement, which lowers specialization. To put it simply, you become fairly proficient and quick at something if you do it all day, every day. Therefore, more employment results in decreased efficiency.

Poorer quality: As with the preceding example, job enlargement may also result in a drop in quality. This isn’t without controversy, though. Another way to become bored is to do the same thing all day, every day. Furthermore, you won’t feel accountable for the entire product if you’re just in charge of a tiny portion of it. Workers lack a complete understanding of the product, which inhibits their sense of ownership and improvement motivation.

Job creep: A job’s workload steadily increasing as more responsibilities are added to it is known as “job creep.” This may cause the task to become unachievable and burdensome. When a job is constantly expanded, it’s known as “job creep” and can cause stress and burnout.

Increased training requirements and costs: Increased training levels and expenses are frequently necessary for job expansion because it entails giving the employee new duties and obligations. Furthermore, it will take some time for the person to attain their optimal level of productivity.

This leads to the conclusion that increasing employment has benefits and drawbacks. Therefore, each case should be evaluated separately to determine whether or not job enlargement is warranted. This will vary based on the particulars of the position. Therefore, while deciding whether or not work enlargement (or any other kind of job enrichment) makes sense for an employee, managers should consult with experts like a partner in human resources or an organizational development specialist.

Example of job enlargement

Let’s wrap up this article with two real-world instances of job enlargement.

As robotization increases, more and more processes are being performed by robots that the surgeon controls via a console that is often placed in the operating room’s corner. When this was put into practice at a large US hospital, the surgeon’s location outside of the operating room was found to impede communication.

In the past, the surgeon issued instructions and directed the process. The surgeon no longer has a complete view of everything going on on and around the operating table, though, since they are no longer physically present there.

This indicates that one of the operational helpers needs to take over a portion of their responsibilities.

As a result, this assistant needed training in both carrying out various tasks that the surgeon would typically complete and in effective communication with the other members of the team. This is an excellent illustration of how robotization and automation can result in an increase in jobs.

The corporate communications department of a sizable, international FMCG corporation provides another illustration. Specialized communication advisers were employed by this company to oversee communications related to the introduction of new digital tools.

The low rate of tool adaptation was one of the issues this organization faced. Investigating further, they discovered that corporate communication was not always in line with the tool’s capabilities and goal. It was found after additional investigation that the communication team was not always properly informed.

This was fixed by giving the communications staff more responsibilities. In addition to conducting user interviews and creating design criteria, the team would be involved in the preliminary discussions and research regarding the goal and primary features of the tools. The communications team’s experience came in handy at this point, allowing them to create a communication plan ahead of time that addressed the user issues that the new software product was resolving.

To sum up

The above examples demonstrate that, although being popularized during a period when people were tired of working at highly specialized assembly lines, job expansion is still a significant issue in today’s digital age. Roles will inevitably become smaller and more specialized as more tasks are mechanized or digitalized. Improving these professions with new responsibilities is an excellent method to make them more diversified.

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