The Changing Nature of Work Implications for Occupational Analysis (1999) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
7 Conclusions and Implications
7 Conclusions and Implications
Pages 263-287
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From page 263... ...
traditional occupational boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred, (3) the range of choices open to human resources managers and other decision makers about how to structure work appears to be increasing, and (4)
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From page 264... ...
Throughout this volume we have presented evidence that work is changing; that occupational analysis and classification systems such as the Dictionary of Occupational Titles are backwardlooking and do not accurately represent the structure of work today; and that a better system is needed that adequately describes the current status of work, takes into account the forces that influence the nature of work, and can be easily and frequently updated as changes occur. A logical but more speculative extension of our analysis of the role of occupational analysis systems is the vision that, if these tools can be designed to be forward-Iooking, they can serve as analytic aids to decision makers in designing jobs and in creating human resource management policies.
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From page 265... ...
Workforce Demographics The demographic characteristics of the labor force continue to evolve and change. The dominant effect of these trends is to increase the diversity of the labor force, particularly with respect to age, education, race, sex, and marital status.
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From page 266... ...
This in turn increases pressures within organizations for flexibility in work organization and sets off an interrelated set of changes in organizational structures and human resource practices: specifically, flatter hierarchies, greater horizontal or cross-functional coordination through teams, and personnel policies designed to support increased flexibility and adaptability. The rapid change in product and service markets and product life cycles suggests that there is more rapid churning in the knowledge base required of employees who design and produce these goods and services.
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From page 267... ...
Although there is insufficient evidence to describe digitization as the kind of technological infrastructure that will produce a third industrial revolution, digital technologies are exerting profound effects on both the content of jobs and the occupational structure. Like other major technical developments of the past, digital technologies are having at least three effects.
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From page 268... ...
Third, digitization is changing the types of skills needed, particularly by reducing some of the manual and sensory-based skills and increasing the analytic and information processing requirements of many production jobs and shifting the emphasis from mechanical manipulation to use of digital symbols and information. If, as some believe, digitization represents a new technological infrastructure equivalent to the first and second industrial revolution, then the pace of technological change and its impacts on work and occupations may only be in its early stages and will probably accelerate in future years.
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The best evidence from national samples indicates that at best there has been only a rather small decline in overall job stability in the l990s. lob displacement, (i.e., involuntary quits or terminations)
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Changing Employment Relations Taken together, the changes in demographics, markets, technologies, and organizational structures and processes have exerted a profound effect on implicit and explicit employment
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Control and Discretion The vertical division of labor is changing in organizations that have flattened their hierarchies, turned to team forms of work organization, and adopted human resource policies often de
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The dominant trend is toward work that mixes physical and sensory skills with higherleve! cognitive skills required by information processing technolo
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Thus the future of jobs will not be determined solely by the forces of technology, demographics, or markets but by the interaction of these forces with the strategies, missions, organizational structures, and employment policies that decision makers implement in specific settings. Choice remains important even when options are constrained by external events and when consequences for organizations, individuals, and society are imperfectly predictable.
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From page 274... ...
The available evidence on the effects of high-performance work systems illustrates this point. Numerous quantitative studies from different industries suggest that when work practices and human resource policies are combined in ways that complement each other, the bundling of tasks has significant, positive effects on productivity, quality, and profitability.
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From page 275... ...
Their concerns may be a symptom of the general perception that we are in the midst of a third industrial revolution driven by a change in technical infrastructure associated with digitization. Historians will eventually decide whether or not the changes in work opened up by digital technologies warrant the label of an industrial revolution, but the evidence that we have summarized is sufficient to suggest that microelectronic technologies are having profound effects on work and occupational structures.
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From page 276... ...
By explicitly taking into account the full range of factors that shape how work is done, we believe that decision makers have the opportunity to develop more effective alternative work structures that could potentially meet a broad range of needs and interests. IMPLICATIONS FOR SYSTEMS OF OCCUPATIONAL ANALYSIS AND CLASSIFICATION To adequately track the changing nature of work, occupational analysis and classification systems must take into account the attributes of the persons who perform work, the processes by which they perform it, the outputs they produce within the dynamic economic, demographic, technological, and the organizational contexts that affect all three.
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From page 277... ...
Rather than provide a single description of a given job, an adequate system for occupational analysis may need to attend to various alternatives for structuring work in a given job family as well as to the attributes and skill requirements associated with these alternatives. Shifting from a backward-Iooking to a forward-Iooking system that will aid decision makers in designing work structures will also require occupational analysts to consider the human resource and organizational practices needed to support alternative ways of structuring work.
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From page 278... ...
And as product and service offerings continuously change with new technologies and customer demands, by implication so too do the information processing requirements of the customer service jobs. One implication of this is that much more research is needed to identify the critical contingencies (e.g., customers, product life cycles, production organization)
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From page 279... ...
Finally, research suggests that workers, particularly highly skilled service workers, often have considerable leeway in defining the scope of services provided and the manner of service delivery. Such individual work discretion presents a challenge to task-oriented occupational analysis methods designed according to the premise that work processes and products are mostly prescribed by job titles.
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Rather than draw such generalizations, we sought to organize our review of the changes in civilian occupations and organizations in a way that would provide the Army with a framework for examining its own work structures and occupational analysis systems. As the material in Chapter 6 shows, the Army is experiencing a number of changes in the context of work that parallel changes experienced in the private economy.
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Those who design and purchase new technical systems need to be informed by and work in tandem with those who design work structures. The key lesson from the civilian sector is that the maximum benefits of a technology come from its effective integration with work systems and human resource practices.
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Extremely high tempo and a strategy that allows attack from multiple positions simultaneously will require commanders who possess suitable decision-making, teamwork, and problemsolving skills; work structures must therefore include descriptors for these skills. Commanders will be supported by different organizational structures that delegate responsibilities and authority to lower ranks, and by technologies that permit such delegation by rapid collection, transmission, and analysis of information.
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From page 283... ...
The same forces that drive delegation of greater decision-making authority and a blurring of the manager-worker boundary in the civilian sector are at work on the officer-soldier boundary in the work of the Army. Downsizing The downsizing of the military forces also creates pressures to delegate to lower-level soldiers tasks and decisions traditionally embedded in officer ranks.
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From page 284... ...
Application of O~NET_ The Army's ability to efficiently manage its personnel, in the complex and rapidly changing contexts expected for future missions, would be enhanced by an occupational analysis system that efficiently links workforce capabilities with mission planning and provides the structure for recruiting, training, assignment, and promotion of personnel. Such a system would provide all the information needed for such tasks as assembling a special operation in the field or for developing training requirements for a combined military occupational specialty.
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IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH Need for Multidisciplinary Studies of Work Our committee used a blend of theoretical perspectives and methodologies and data drawn from multiple disciplines to assess how work is changing and its implications. In doing so, we both broadened the perspectives most scholars and practitioners use to study work and to make decisions that affect work structures and their consequences.
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Throughout this volume we have stressed the need for more ntensive direct observation of what workers actually do in their jobs today. Changing the images of work and going beyond abstract arguments about trends in skills requires detailed and rich description and data reported from direct experiences of workers.
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Furthermore, this book may provide a starting point for the analysis of the role of law by presenting data on how work has changed since the basic legal framework governing employment relations was enacted.
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