Employees alter the tasks, relationships and meaning of their jobs without authorisation, so the job as done differs systematically from the job as designed.
Wrzesniewski and Dutton's 2001 study found hospital cleaners who had redefined their work to include comforting patients and orienting visitors, and who described the job in terms no job description contained. The crafting is usually invisible to management, which means both the effort and the resulting competence are unrecorded.
In practice
- A role description bears little relation to what the postholder actually does, and the gap is what makes the role work.
- A replacement hired against the written specification cannot do the job the leaver was doing.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Creativity & Work
- Essay
- Protecting the conditions for good work