oct 28

The topic of discussion for Tuesday’s lecture was recognizing employee effort. If being a student was thought of as a job, the job characteristics that would score the highest would be task identity as student work generally requires completion of a whole identifiable piece of work such as an essay. Task significance would score high as well, as most work done in school is very important and affects our learning and abilities. Feedback, autonomy, and skill variety are all negligible as these are dependent on the course and instructor. This course, for example, has high skill variety as we are expected to complete various tasks that are all different and use many of our skills such as reading, writing, analytical and research etc. Autonomy is also a big characteristic in university especially for students transitioning from high school to university as a lot more independence is expected. There are however some courses in which there is limited independence as the instructor may give a lot of direction and instruction; this however, is not a bad thing at all. In this course for example, our instructor has created an outline for notes for us, she has given instruction on what we should focus on, this reduces our autonomy a little bit, but it increases task identity and task significance. This course also requires us to have autonomy, as our career projects are very independent and flexible on our schedules and preferences.

Professors in general could maybe explain tasks and how they relate to the course and why they are significant; this in turn will help to increase task significance as well as task identity. A big problem I find is that sometimes professors do not incorporate a variety of assessments to test our various talents and skills, and generally use only limited means of evaluation such as exams and essays. If professors increased the variety in which students were evaluated, this would help to increase skill variety which would use students’ various talents and abilities, and in turn help to increase self-confidence, among other things.

As I have mentioned previously in this blog, in the summer I worked for Toronto Social Services as a Support Assistant and performed tasks such as making phone calls, filing, scheduling appointments, mailing out letters, making photocopies, etc. This job had skill variety because I was able to use different skills and talents to complete various tasks, but at times it did get somewhat dull, as I found myself repeating some tasks more than others which was frustrating as I felt as though I could do a lot more with my time and knowledge. This position did offer a lot of autonomy, as a lot of the work was independent, and based on personal deadlines. There was definite task identity because we always had to start and finish something; nothing was left undone. Although it was hard to visualize task significance at times, I guess I could understand the importance of my job because I was dealing with customers frontline. How I treated and responded to customers would affect their overall view of the city of Toronto. Sometimes clients would call back and send cards to show their appreciation; this is an example of feedback from the job. Overall this position did include all five core job dimensions, even if it was sometimes hard to recognize.