What are the four major approaches to job design?

Different textbooks are inevitably going to suggest
different ways of sorting out job design, and the above categorization is certainly one
way, but there are others.  Another way of approaching this is with the following four
classifications:

Job Rotation: Designing a job with job
rotation means building in a variety of tasks for all employees, thus eliminating
boredom on the job, expanding the employee's areas of competence, and providing more
flexibility in staffing and work flow.  However, the drawbacks to this are that one
cannot always realize economies of scale and employees who have difficulty multi-tasking
might find jobs like this difficult or frustrating.  There are work settings where this
is a good idea, for example, in a medical office in which front office employees have a
variety of responsibilities, but there are work settings where this is a bad idea, for
example, on an assembly line.

Job Engineering: This method
of job design focuses on the tasks to be done, the time involved in doing the tasks, and
the efficiency of product or service flow through the process.  There is no attention
paid to employees' job satisfaction or lack thereof in this design process, but in a
highly mechanized environment, there is usually a need for job engineering design.  It
would be difficult, for example, to put together a machine or a vehicle without
attending to these priorities.

Job Enlargement: This kind
of job design returns again to the principles of job motivation and satisfaction,
building in a natural progression for employees to take on additional tasks that are a
logical extension of what they already do.  This could just as easily be called job
expansion.  The idea is to begin employees with one task and once they have achieved
mastery, they can add an additional task that is in keeping with the first task.  So, an
employee might handle only the simplest sort of customer service calls and then expand
to more complex ones as time goes on.  This is motivating, since, if Theory Y holds
true, which I believe it does, we gain internal satisfaction from acquiring new skills. 
We like to learn! 

Job Enrichment: Once again, this is a
means of designing jobs to motivate employees, also based on Theory Y principles.  This
is similar to job enlargement in that the employee gets to do more tasks, but the focus
is more on autonomy and responsibility in the tasks that are part of the enrichment.  An
employee might begin with responsibility to sell a product, and then be given the
responsibility to service the accounts for that product, and ultimately be given his or
her own budget and control over his or her scheduling to do so.  Autonomy is one of the
most powerful motivators in job satisfaction, so this is a highly successful way of
designing the work environment. 

I do want to emphasize
that a particular text on human resources or on management could very well divide job
design into four entirely different categories, but this is a good approach to consider,
providing choices for the mechanized environment or for employee motivation and
satisfaction.  A good job designer will bear in mind all the important attributes of
each, to maximize job performance and efficiency.