A Study on Job Enrichment and Individual Performance among Faculties with Special Reference to a Private University

Job enrichment is one of the cherished goals to achieve individual performance. It is essential to understand how job enrichment is a valuable tool for managing and fostering the successful employee performance. Enriched job consists of various elements like task significance, task identity and skill variety which improves the performance of employees and motivates them to perform zealously. This study intends to focus on the relationship between job enrichment and individual performance. A quantitative research is employed to explore the factors of job enrichment (Task Significance, Task Identity & Skill Variety) on individual performance in education institution. Data was collected from the faculties in private university using probability stratified random sampling techniques to measure the relationship between the three factors towards individual performance. An empirical evidence from the exploratory study is presented which identified that the second factor contributes more on enhancing the performance of the individuals. Further research can be conducted on other factors of job enrichment and their impact on individual performance of the employees in education institution.


Introduction
Job enrichment analyzed the various assumptions inherent in the job enrichment approach, along with the ramifications and utility of employing it in work organizations.This article suggested that the utility of job enrichment programs predicted on the development of increasing intrinsic job elements and down-grading attention to extrinsic factors, is questionable, at best.Kaplan et al (1969).
Job enrichment adds a feeling of satisfaction derived from work itself.Structured jobs make people feel like human beings rather than units of production and that the pressures arising from the obvious discrepancies between social and technological changes are reduced Walsh (1974).
There is interdependence between job enrichment, job enlargement, employees' satisfaction and employee's performance.Job enrichment and job enlargement made the employees' feel that the organization actually owns them and thus improved their performance.Employees' performance can be enhanced by increasing their satisfaction level and satisfaction level can be enhanced by enriching and enlarging their jobs in the organization Saleem et al (2012).
The job enrichment enhances the motivation level and the performance of the employees on the work place and their propensity to achieve the goals is also becomes more possible (Bryan & Locke, 1967;Latham & Baldes, 1975;Latham & Kinne, 1974;Latham & Yukl, 1975;Ronan, Latham, & Kinne, 1973;Herzberg & Frederick, 1968;Myers, 1970;Raja, 1974).Norton et al. (1979) evaluated whether or not job enrichment had taken place and examined the conditions under which it was likely to be a success or a failure.The paper also studied the evolution of the term 'job enrichment'; contrast job enrichment to other organizational change methodologies; examined the most widely used measures of job content and job satisfaction; offered a paradigm for research on job enrichment; discussed two major reviews of job enrichment -one critical and one supportive and suggested conditions which research may show to be related to the success of job enrichment programs.McLean and Sims (1978) in their article on job enrichment from theoretical poverty considered various definitions of the concept of job enrichment and considered the findings of job enrichment studies.The article also illustrated some shortcomings in the theory and its applications and summarized these shortcomings so that instead of remaining isolated and incomprehensible failures they point to areas of deficiency.The research evidence suggested that a more promising line for the practitioner would be the development of an approach which enables them to discover directly from the employees themselves the meaning that their work has for them, their aspirations in work and the forms of satisfaction which they do and do not hope to gain from it.They concluded that only such a 'redesigned' approach to choosing and making the changes involved can ever lead to predictable, successful job redesign.King-Taylor (1977) in her article on job enrichment and motivation suggested that jobs must be revised to meet the needs and fulfill the aspirations of people as individuals, not as robots.The author insisted that a program of job enrichment should usually begin by defining the jobs which had to be done and which were affected by the programme; a project team comprising representatives of the task holders should be formed to do this.According to the author, 'brainstorming' sessions during which the people involved in the jobs suggest as many changes as possible, could conceivably make them more challenging and interesting, as well as more efficient and productive.According to the author, job enrichment is not a technique, but a way of managing which is married into the company philosophy and organizational structure -job enrichment is in essence, true participation and worker involvement.Collins and Raubolt (1975) examined the association between employee background and occupational characteristics and degree of resistance to a job enrichment programe in a large-scale manufacturing firm.The study group consisted of engineers, engineering associates and draftsmen.The questionnaire included background and occupational characteristics such as age, education, position and tenure.The findings revealed that education was the most important determinant of degree of resistance.Employees with a college degree were found to be less resistant to job enrichment than were employees without a degree.Other important determinants found were age and task performed, revealed that more youthful employees were non-resistant than older employees and more employees who were performing similar tasks were non-resistant than were employees performing general tasks.The study also revealed other characteristics with resistance to job enrichment such as the number of years to retirement.Werther (1975) stated that employment enrichment views the total work enrichment confronting employees as a system which consists of two overlapping areas: the worker-job subsystem and the worker-organization subsystem.According to him, the purpose of job enrichment is to improve the worker-job relationship.Job enrichment addresses itself primarily to one dimension of the employment relationship: the worker-job aspect represents the most significant component of the employee's connection with the organization.He argued that without changes in the overall workerorganization relationship, employees were apt to believe job enrichment is manipulative.Moreover, the author pointed out that the removal of the more dehumanizing characteristics of the job causes the employee-organization interface to increase in importance -the worker becomes more sensitized to the negative aspects of his association since there were fewer unpleasant distractions in connection with the job.

Factors of Job Enrichment
The following three job features are considered in the model; task significance, task identity and Skill variety which is defined as formulated in Hackman & Oldham (1975).

Task Significance
Work that has a direct impact on the organization or its stakeholders.It indicates that worker should consider that they are doing something in their organization and or society.

Task Identity
Facilitating people to carry out a complete piece of work.When the task is widened to produce an entire product then the task identity recognized.ISSN 2039-9340 (print) Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences MCSER Publishing, Rome-Italy Vol 6 No 1 January 2015 254

Skill Variety
Increasing the number of skills that individual employ while performing work.Variety provides employees a greater sense of capability as they can perform various kinds of works in different ways.

Individual Performance
In current era employee performance has been into a lot of debates among the industrialist and researchers.Employee performance within an organization can be defined with a variety of ways including their behavior, attitude and motivation to achieve goals (Ali and Jadoon, 2012).Taylor was one of the initial providers who had recognized the factors that are going to influence the performance of the employee during the work and in overall development.There are 4 major factors that may affect the employee performance.These are: Job Autonomy Organizational Support Training Justice in the Organization

Job Autonomy
Job autonomy can play a vital role in enhancing the performance of the employee in the organization.Job autonomy creates a sense of responsibility among the employees (Dean, Colarelli & Konstans, 1987).Increasing impact of job autonomy on the employee performance and the absence of job autonomy in the organizations creates so many problems like decrease in productivity, performance and increase in stress.The employee performance cannot be increased merely by increasing the focus on the authority, discipline and control in the organizations (Hart &Willower, 1994).

Organizational Support and Performance
The sense of ownership in the organization that the company is giving importance their views and giving them importance is collectively called as organizational support and the existence of that also increase the employee performance (Fasolo, Eisenberger & Davis LaMastr, 1990).The employees can give extra ordinary effort to the productivity of the organization when the organization is giving them full support.

Training and Performance
The effects of training on performance in service companies.The aim of the study was to determine whether effort invested by service companies in employee training had an impact on their economic performance.Data was measured over a period of nine years.The findings supported that training activities are a positive influence on company performance Del Valle et al. (2009).

Organizational Justice and Performance
The organizational justice has been a very hot topic from a long time period till now and all level of researchers and also among the professional society.The organizational justice when achieved in its true sense, it may affect the employee performance, their commitment level in the organization and also their level of efforts towards achievement of their goals (Folger and Cropanzano, 1998).

Research Objective
To discover the factors that predicted job enrichment.
To understand the relationship between job enrichment and individual performance.
The responses were collected from the faculties in a private university.A stratified random sampling technique was used for the survey.The population of faculty of the private University is divided into small strata namely program chairs and division chairs and only these program chairs and division chairs is taken in to consideration for the study.The program chairs and division chairs of the University are enriched with more responsibility, power and authority for administrative purpose.This study was undertaken to analyse if job enrichment of the program chairs and division chairs enhanced their individual performance at work.To understand the relationship between job enrichment and individual performance a structured questionnaire was used to accumulate the data from various department faculties with direct contact.A total of 22 items was used for this survey excluding demographic characteristics.The sample size of the study is 56.The statistical package for social science (spss, version20) was used to analyze the data.The reliability test has been conducted to verify the internal consistency of the variables obtained in the sample.The cronbach's alpha is found to 0.902, which is much higher than the minimum acceptable level suggested by (Nunally, 1978).

Demographic Details of the Respondents
Earlier researches had revealed that demographic variables had a vital role to play in any type of studies.Whatever the study may be, the demographic variables had a considerable impact on the dependent variable of the study.The researcher tried to understand demographic variables like age, sex and experience of the employees.Table 5.1.1 presents the frequency distribution of the respondents on each of the demographic variables.From 56 respondents, 28 (50%) are male and 28(50%) are female respondents.The sample is representative of all age groups.Majority of the respondents (29%) are of the age group between 31-35 years.When experience of the respondents is considered it is understood from the table above that nearly (64.3%) of the respondents has between 8 -10 years of experience.Thus it is clear that the study has generated responses from varied range of respondents adequately representing the diversity of the total population of the selected education institution.

Scale Reliability
The reliability of the scale is tested and the alpha value obtained is 0.902.This value is higher than the acceptable (Table 5.1.1)lower limit of 0.6 according to Nunnally, J.C (1978).Being satisfied with the reliability of the instrument, the researcher carried out item to total item correlation to identify and remove any item that deviated in value.This process was repeated until it was made sure that there will not be any more improvement in the alpha value, by removing any item.Finally from 22 items only 3 deviating items was removed and the rest 19 items with an increased alpha value of .908after item to item correlation was retained by the researcher which is summarized in Table .5.2.3

Factor Analysis
After deciding on the 10 independent items that correlate well with each other, exploratory factor analysis was carried out to identify the underlying interventions for job enrichment.But before proceeding on with factor analysis, few preliminary tests like Kaiser Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of Sampling Adequacy (.74) and Bartlett's Test of Sphericity was done to justify that factor analysis is an appropriate tool for the present study.
In KMO test a value closer to 1 indicates that the patterns of correlations are relatively compact and so the factor analysis should yield distinct and reliable factors.Kaiser (1974) recommends accepting values greater than 0.5 as acceptable.To make certain that a given item represented the construct in the underlying factor, a factor loading of .40 was used as the minimum cutoff (Youndt et al, 1996).The result of the factor analysis is provided in Table .5.3.1.Three Factors were derived with Eigen values greater than one and total variance of 71 percent was explained Three items Opportunity, Job Well, Expectation for Me such as were loaded under Factor Three with loading ranging from .83 to .62.The Alpha Value for the third factor is .68 and the factor mean score is 4.3 (Table.5.3.2) which indicated very strong level of agreement among the respondents for Factor three.The three items loaded under this factor indicated that the institution provided them opportunity to use and improve their skills.Hence Factor Three was named as Skill Variety.

Relationship Between Demographic Variables And Individual Performance
H1 -There is no significant relationship between various demographic variables and Individual Performance.
H2 -There is no association between job enrichment and individual performance ).This indicated that there is no significant difference between age, gender, experience and individual performance.

Job Enrichment Model
After checking out the positive and strong relationship of job enrichment with individual performance and multiple regression model for individual performance in education institution was developed with various job enrichment practices like as task significance, task identity and skill variety predictors with the hypothesis that each of the predictor would have differing prediction ability on individual performance.

Job Enrichment Model And Individual Performance
A multiple regression model for building Individual Performance in education institution was developed with various Job Enrichment Practices like as task significance, task identity and skill variety predictors with the hypothesis that each of the predictor would have differing prediction ability on individual performance.The factors influencing individual performance is expected to have positive magnitude and the theoretical expectation is portrayed in the model with positive contribution by the various factors.

Model Summary
The coefficient of determination (Table ) R 2 was compared to determine percentage variation in the dependent variable.F value was to compute the significance of R 2 with F-distribution at 5% level of significance.The model is found fit on significance (.000) of independent variable proving individual performance depends on Job enrichment practices like task significance, task identity and skill variety.
The prediction ability of the model is expressed by R square which was .611whereby 61% (Table .5.5.1), of the variance in individual performance was explained by Job Enrichment practices like task significance, task identity and skill variety with F-value 27.184 (Table .5.5.2) at .000 level of significance.In predicting the development of individual performance (Table .5.5.3), in education institution it is found that task identity is found to be the most important variable ( = 0.773, t=8.932 followed by task significance ( 0.105, t= 1.210) and skill variety ( =0.048, t=0.559).The study revealed individual performance is influenced by job enrichment.Task identity helps the employees to meet the standard of work and to cope up with the changes in the Institution.With these characteristics of task identity employee becomes more valuable for an Institution.

Conclusion
The finding of this study has proved a relationship between Job enrichment and Individual performance.Among job enrichment factors Task Identity contributes more towards enhancing the performance of individuals.Hence academic institution should focus on giving academic freedom to their faculty.This would enable them to utilize their skills and ability and space should be provided for the faculty to complete their, task on their own.

Table 5 .3.1. Factor Analysis -Rotated Component Matrix
Expectation to Institution, Priorities and Direction, Colleagues Appreciation and Task Completion are loaded under factor one with factor loadings ranging from .85 to .68.The Alpha Value for the first factor is .81and the factor mean score is 3.7 (Table.5.3.2) which indicated a strong level of agreement among the respondents for Factor one.The four items loaded under factor one emphasize that the work of employees directly contributed to the Institution.Hence Factor One was named as Task significance.Three items like Well Being, Goal and Values and Special Favor were loaded under Factor two with loading ranging from .85 to .82.The Alpha Value for the second factor is .87and the factor mean score is 4.0 (Table.5.3.2) which indicated a strong level of agreement among the respondents for Factor two.The items loaded under Factor two emphasized that the Institution facilitated the employees for job enrichment.Hence Factor two is named as Task Identity.

Table 5 .
5.1.Multiple Regression Analysis For Individual Performance And Job Enrichment Variables As Predictors

Table 5 .
5.3.Association Of Job Enrichment And Individual Performance