Job Analysis Meaning Definition Purpose Methods

Dive into the comprehensive guide on job analysis, exploring its importance in human resource management. Gain insights into its meaning, processes, methods, objectives, and significance in organizational performance. Understand how job analysis aids in recruitment, training, performance appraisal, and promoting workplace safety, along with the competency approach and its implications in modern job structuring.

Job Analysis: Understanding Its Meaning, Concepts, Purposes, Contents, Process, and Methods

This article explores the comprehensive topic of job analysis, covering its introduction, meaning, definitions, concept, contents, objectives, purposes, process, methods, functions, significance, areas, advantages, the competency approach, and other related details. Below are HR Guide to Job Analysis: Introduction, Meaning, Process, and Methods:

Job Analysis – Introduction:

In countries like India, jobs hold significant importance for individuals, influencing their standard of living, place of residence, social status, and self-worth. Organizations also rely on jobs to achieve their objectives. Historically, jobs were defined rigidly, considered immutable regardless of the incumbent.

However, in reality, jobs are dynamic and subject to change due to technological advancements and competition. This often shifts the focus from standard duties to features of successful performance. To understand this dynamic nature, managers regularly gather information about jobs.

Job Analysis – Meaning:

Job analysis is a systematic and detailed examination of jobs. It involves collecting information about the knowledge, skills, and experience required to effectively perform a job. A jobholder needs job-related knowledge to perform tasks easily, relevant skills to apply that knowledge, and the ability to utilize tools, equipment, materials, and resources effectively to achieve results.

The qualifications of a job incumbent are determined after a careful examination of job requirements. Essentially, job analysis is the “anatomy of the job,” a complete study encompassing duties, responsibilities, working conditions, task nature, required worker qualities, and employment conditions (pay, hours, opportunities, privileges). It also highlights the relationship between different jobs within the organization.

Job Analysis – Definitions:

1. Edwin B. Flippo: “Job analysis is the process of studying and collecting information relating to the operations and responsibilities of a specific job. The immediate products of this analysis are job descriptions and job specifications.”
2. David A. De Cenzo and Stephen P. Robbins: “Job analysis is a systematic exploration of the activities within a job. It is a basic technical procedure, one that is used to define the duties, responsibilities, and accountabilities of a job.”
3. Herbert G. Hereman III: “A job analysis is a collection of tasks that can be performed by a single employee to contribute to the production of some product or service provided by the organization. Each job has certain ability requirements (as well as certain rewards) associated with it. It is the process used to identify these requirements.”
   In essence, job analysis is the process of collecting information about a job.

Job Analysis – Concept:

It is a scientific and systematic process of collecting and analyzing data related to a job within an organization to obtain all pertinent facts. It is defined as “the process of determining by observing and study the tasks, which comprise the job; the methods and equipments used, and the skills and attitudes required for successful performance of the job.”

As defined by Edwin B. Flippo,

“job analysis as the process of studying and collecting information relating to the operations and responsibilities of a specific job. The immediate products of this analysis are job descriptions and job specifications.”

Job analysis provides crucial information about:

• The nature of jobs required in an organization.
• The nature of the organizational structure.
• The type of people needed to fit that structure.
• The relationship of a job with other jobs in the organization.
• The qualifications required for a particular job.
• The physical conditions needed to support organizational activities.
• The materials, equipment, and methods used in performing the job.

Job Analysis – Contents:

A job analysis typically provides the following information:

• Job identification: Its title, including a code number.
• Significant characteristics of a job: Location, physical setting, supervision, union jurisdiction, hazards, and discomforts.
• What the typical worker does: Specific operations and tasks, their relative timing and importance, simplicity, routine or complexity, and responsibility for others’ safety, property, funds, trust, and confidence.
• Materials and equipment used: Examples include metals, plastics, grains, yarns, milling machines, punch presses, and micrometers.
• How a job is performed: The nature of operations, such as lifting, handling, cleaning, washing, feeding, removing, drilling, driving, and setting up.
• Required personnel attributes: Experience, training, apprenticeship, physical strength, coordination or dexterity, physical demands, mental capabilities, aptitudes, and social skills.
• Job relationship: Experience required, opportunities for advancement, promotion patterns, and essential cooperation, direction, or leadership to and from a job.

This information clearly forms the basis for a job description and job specification.

Job Analysis – Objectives:

The primary objectives of job analysis are:

• Work Simplification: Information from job analysis can be used to simplify processes or jobs by dividing them into smaller operations, thereby improving production or job performance.
• Setting Up of Standards: Job analysis provides information that enables the establishment of minimum acceptable qualities, results, performance, or rewards for a particular job.
• Support to Personnel Activities: Job analysis is foundational for various personnel activities, including recruitment, selection, training and development, wage administration, and performance appraisal.

Job Analysis – Purposes:

A comprehensive job analysis (JA) program is vital for sound personnel management. It serves as a major input for forecasting future human resource needs, job modifications, job evaluation, determining appropriate compensation, and writing job descriptions. Its wide applicability makes it fundamentally important to manpower management programs, with its results being useful in nearly every phase of employee relations.

1. Organization and Manpower Planning: JA assists in organizational planning by defining labor needs concretely, coordinating workforce activities, and clearly dividing duties and responsibilities.
2. Recruitment, Selection: By outlining specific job requirements (skills and knowledge), JA provides a realistic basis for hiring, training, placement, transfer, and promotion. The goal is to match job requirements with a worker’s aptitudes, abilities, and interests. It also helps in charting promotion channels and lateral transfer opportunities.
3. Wage and Salary Administration: By detailing required qualifications, risks, and hazards, JA supports salary and wage administration, serving as a foundation for job evaluation.
4. Job Reengineering: JA provides information that allows for job changes to accommodate personnel with specific characteristics and qualifications. This takes two forms:
   • (a) Industrial engineering activity: Focuses on operational analysis, motion study, work simplification, workplace improvement, and measurement to enhance efficiency, reduce labor costs, and establish production standards.
   • (b) Human engineering activity: Considers human physical and psychological capabilities to prepare for complex industrial administration operations, increasing efficiency and productivity.
5. Employee Training and Management Development: JA provides necessary information for training and development programs, helping to determine course content and subject matter. It also assists in reviewing applications, conducting interviews, weighing test results, and checking references.
6. Performance Appraisal: JA aids in establishing clear performance standards against which individual contributions can be compared.
7. Health and Safety: It helps identify hazardous conditions and unhealthy environmental factors, enabling corrective measures to minimize accidents.

Other things:

Job analysis is a systematic procedure for gathering and reporting job-specific information. It has numerous applications in personnel management, including determining qualifications, guiding recruitment and selection, evaluating employees for transfer or promotion, establishing training program requirements, serving as a basis for job evaluation, aiding employee development through appraisal and counseling, improving health, safety, and fatigue management, guiding discipline and grievances, serving as a basis for transfers, layoffs, comparing pay rates, and establishing workloads and job assignments. It also facilitates job redesign to improve performance or enrich job content, empowering employees with a greater sense of accomplishment and control.

JA produces four crucial types of documentation and procedures for personnel activities:

(i) Job description;

(ii) Job specification;

(iii) Job evaluation; and

(iv) Personnel assessment.

These are fundamental inputs for various personnel functions.

Key Process (How to Conduct Job Analysis?):

Conducting a job analysis involves eight key steps:

• Identify Purpose of Job Analysis: Clearly define the purpose to ensure all relevant information and methods are considered.
• Selection of Analyst: Choose analysts from professional human resources, line managers, incumbents, or consultants to assign responsibilities for the analysis.
• Selection of Method: Select representative positions for analysis (as analyzing all jobs may not be necessary or feasible) and then identify the most appropriate analysis method for each.
• Train the Analyst: Provide internal analysts with appropriate training to ensure efficient and effective use of selected job analysis methods.
• Preparation of Job Analysis: This includes communicating the project within the organization and preparing necessary documentation.
• Collection of Data: Job analysts gather data on job activities, employee behaviors, working conditions, and the human traits and abilities required for the job.
• Review and Verify: Analysts must verify collected data to confirm its factual accuracy and completeness.
• Develop a Job Description and Job Specification: Create a job description (a written statement detailing activities, responsibilities, working conditions, safety, and hazards) and a job specification (summarizing required personal qualities, traits, skills, and background).

Job Analysis – Methods:

Methods for collecting job analysis information include direct observation, work method analysis, critical incident technique, interview, and questionnaire methods.

• Direct Observation Method: Observing and recording behaviors, events, activities, tasks, and duties as the worker or group performs the job. This method is effective when the analyst is skilled in knowing what, how, and what is being observed.
• Work Method Analysis: Used for describing manual and repetitive production jobs (e.g., factory or assembly-line jobs). It includes time and motion study and micro-motion analysis.
• Critical Incident Technique: Identifies work behaviors that define good and poor performance. Jobholders describe critical job-related incidents, which are then analyzed and classified by job areas.
• Interview Method: Involves asking questions to both incumbents and supervisors, individually or in groups. Interview types include structured, unstructured, and open-ended questions.

Questionnaire Method:

Includes six specific techniques:

• a. Position Analysis Questionnaire (PAQ Model): A structured instrument developed by Mc Cormick, Jeanneret, and Mecham (1972) with 195 job elements describing generic human work behaviors, used to measure job and human characteristics.
• b. Functional Job Analysis (FJA Model): Developed by the U.S. Department of Labour’s Employment and Training Administration, it uses seven scales to measure: three worker-function scales (percentage of time spent with data, people, things), one worker-instruction scale, and three scales for reasoning, mathematics, and language.
• c. Work Profiling System (WPS Model): A computer-administered questionnaire system for job analysis developed by Saville & Holds worth, Ltd.
• d. MOSAIC Model: A questionnaire technique used to collect information from incumbents and supervisors, containing 151 job tasks rated for importance and 22 competencies rated for importance and needed entry-level proficiency.
• e. Common Metric Questionnaire (CMQ Model): Developed by Harvey as a “worker-oriented” instrument applicable to a broad range of jobs. It includes 41 general background questions, 62 questions on contacts with people, 80 items on decision-making, 53 items on physical and mechanical activities, and 47 items on work setting.
• f. Fleishman Job Analysis System (FJAS Model): Describes jobs based on necessary capacities, including 52 cognitive, physical, psychomotor, and sensory abilities, each with an operational and differential definition and a grading scale.

Job Analysis – Functions:

They provides the following information:

1. Job identification: Its title, including its code number.
2. Significant characteristics of a job: Location, physical setting, supervision, union jurisdiction, hazards, and discomforts.
3. What the typical worker does: Specific operations and tasks, their relative timing and importance, simplicity, routine or complexity, and responsibility for others.
4. Job duties: A detailed list of duties with their probable frequency.
5. Materials and equipment used: Examples include metals, plastics, grains, yarn, lathes, milling machines, testers, punch presses, and micrometers.
6. How a job is performed: The nature of operations like lifting, handling, cleaning, washing, feeding, removing, drilling, driving, and setting up.
7. Required Personal Attributes: Experience, training, apprenticeship, physical strength, coordination or dexterity, physical demands, mental capabilities, aptitudes, and social skills.
8. Job Relationship: Opportunities for advancement, promotion patterns, and essential cooperation.

It is also provides information on mental skills, working conditions, hazards, education, and vocational preparation.

Sources of Job Analysis Information:

Information for job analysis can be obtained from three main sources:

(a) Employees: Those who actually perform the job.

(b) Supervisors and Foremen: Other employees who observe workers and gain job knowledge.

(c) Outside Observers: Specially appointed individuals (trade job analysts) or special job reviewing committees.

Job Analysis – Significance:

1. Facilitates Manpower Planning: Job analysis addresses the qualitative aspect of manpower requirements, determining job demands in terms of responsibilities and duties, and translating these into necessary skills and human attributes. It helps divide work into different jobs and is crucial for matching jobs with individuals.
2. Helps Recruitment, Selection and Placement: By providing information on job requirements (job description) and individual qualities (job specification), job analysis aids in hiring the right person by matching job needs with worker aptitudes, abilities, and interests. It also supports promotion and transfer charting.
3. Determines Training and Development Needs: Job analysis establishes job performance standards and helps administer training and development programs. Knowing job descriptions and specifications encourages employees to acquire necessary skills and knowledge and prepare for higher positions. This information also guides the content of such programs.
4. Determines Job Evaluation: Job evaluation, which aims to determine the relative worth of a job for compensation purposes, relies on accurate and comprehensive job descriptions and specifications.
5. Provides Data for Performance Appraisal: Job analysis data creates clear performance standards for each job, allowing for objective appraisal of employee contributions.
6. Helps Job Designing: Industrial engineers use job analysis information for job design through studies of job elements, time and motion, work simplification, workplace improvement, and work measurement. Human engineering activities (physical, mental, psychological) are also studied using this information.
7. Ensures Safety and Health: The process uncovers hazardous and unhealthy environmental factors (heat, noise, fumes, dust), enabling management to take corrective measures to ensure worker safety and prevent unhealthy conditions.
8. Maintains Discipline: By providing information on job characteristics and jobholders, and studying performance failures, job analysis helps take timely corrective measures to maintain discipline.

Job Analysis – Areas:

They should gather information in the following areas:

• i.  Duties and Tasks: The core unit of a job. Information includes frequency, duration, effort, skill, complexity, equipment, and standards.
• ii.  Environment: The work environment’s impact on physical requirements, including unpleasant conditions (odors, extreme temperatures) and risks (fumes, radioactive substances, hostile people, dangerous explosives).
• iii.  Tools and equipment: Specific equipment and tools used, including protective clothing.
• iv.  Relationships: Details of supervision given and received, and relationships with internal or external individuals.
• v.  Requirements: Clearly defined minimum knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) needed to perform the job, even if an incumbent possesses higher KSAs.

Job Analysis – Advantages:

It is a vital component of human resource management, providing valuable information to HR managers:

• i.  Assists in recruitment and selection of the right person for the right job.
• ii.  Helps understand the extent and scope of required training.
• iii.  Aids in evaluating the relative worth of different jobs.
• iv.  Facilitates the creation of employee compensation plans.
• v.  Enables effective performance appraisal.
• vi.  Reveals unhealthy and hazardous environmental and operational conditions.
• vii. Provides pertinent information for collective bargaining between management and trade unions.
• viii. Offers necessary information for effective human resource planning.

Job Analysis – Competency Approach:

Modern job structuring emphasizes flexibility, considering the unique requirements of the situation and the demands of jobholders, rather than rigid definitions. For instance, downsizing may lead to merging jobs with similar duties, or cost-cutting may combine roles like a typist and an office assistant. The trend towards leaner organizations requires fewer employees to handle diverse roles. Ideally, employees with transferable skills and knowledge should be hired, allowing them to seamlessly move between jobs with self-control and self-direction.

Competencies are observable and measurable behaviors that enable effective job performance. Competency-based analysis describes a job in terms of these measurable, observable, behavioral competencies (e.g., requiring a software engineer to design complex software programs).

Why Competency Analysis?

Traditional job analysis focuses on KSAs (knowledge, skills, and abilities) required for specific jobs and the linkages between them, concentrating on “what needs to be done” in terms of duties. This may not suffice when high performance is organizational demand. Employees who are not innovative or unwilling to take on tasks outside their narrow specialty can hinder performance. Competency analysis, conversely, is worker-focused, emphasizing the core and specific competencies an employee must possess to complete tasks.

Core competencies are characteristics expected of every organizational member, regardless of position. Specific competencies are shared by different positions. Competency models emphasize “how” a worker meets objectives and accomplishes work, incorporating personality and value orientations (e.g., risk-taking) for a “fit” within the organizational culture (Sanchez).

Limitations:

Competency approaches face significant opposition. Schippmann et al. argue that they are too broad and ill-defined to be practical for guiding job performance. Another criticism is their focus on behaviors rather than results, emphasizing “how” individuals are expected to perform instead of their demonstrated achievements.

The term “competency” itself is often vaguely interpreted. Research indicates discrepancies between managers’ and workers’ perceptions of competencies and skills, particularly regarding “workplace autonomy” and “level of required skills.” The exact requirements for successful job performance remain unclear and unexplained. Many HR practitioners, academics, and even trade unions doubt the long-term practicality of these “ill-defined” approaches (F. Green; J. Sandberg).

Job Analysis and Total Quality Management (TQM):

The concept of Total Quality Management (TQM) emphasizes a complete commitment to quality. Michael Armstrong outlines essential features of TQM:

1. Creating a common company theme.
2. Cultivating a customer-centric mentality (“customer is king”).
3. Making job improvement an integral part of the job.
4. Studying and reassessing the purpose of each job function.
5. Establishing improvement as a continuous process.
6. Improving communication systems.
7. Reducing bureaucratic activities.

TQM demands a new, broad perspective from every employee. For example, a typist’s role extends beyond typing letters to encompass the entire office’s operations, aiming for better quality products or services. While some argue TQM makes job analysis irrelevant, many experts believe it remains useful for stipulating basic tasks. Under TQM, job descriptions should outline core tasks while allowing for additional duties.

Job Analysis – Notes:

Job analysis can be a powerful source of competitive advantage by structuring jobs precisely according to requirements. It enables clear forecasting of human resource needs and facilitates systematic promotion and transfer policies. It promotes equitable hiring, placing the right person in the right place at the right time, and offering growth opportunities to deserving candidates.

This encourages employees to upgrade their skills and talents. Those struggling can receive special coaching and counseling. Systematic performance appraisals can differentiate high performers. Thus, job analysis helps an organization manage every job-related activity meticulously, leading to immense benefits in employee satisfaction and morale.

Potential Problems with Job Analysis:

The effectiveness of job analysis hinges on consistent top management support. Its usefulness is also dependent on the data collection methods. Jobholders may sometimes provide inaccurate data due to a lack of understanding or even deliberate distortion to sabotage the process. Most of these issues can be mitigated if management clearly documents job descriptions and requirements (skills, qualifications) and educates employees about the purpose of the job analysis.

Job Analysis – Techniques of Data Collection:

Several techniques can be used for data collection, often individually or in combination:

(i) Interviews:

*   Individual interviews: With groups of employees performing the same job.

*   Supervisory interviews: With supervisors knowledgeable about the job.

(ii) Direct Observation: Particularly useful for jobs involving observable physical activity (e.g., draftsmen, mechanics). Approaches include observing a complete work cycle and taking notes, followed by interviewing the worker, or observing and interviewing simultaneously.

(iii) Maintenance of Long Records: Workers keep daily records of their activities. This provides comprehensive information, especially when supplemented with interviews.

(iv) Questionnaires: Many companies use these to gather information on typical duties, tasks, and tools/equipment used.

(v) Critical Incident Technique: Useful for scientific analysis and selection research. It involves collecting short examples of successful or unsuccessful job behavior, which are then classified into behavioral categories to describe desired job behaviors for recruitment and selection.

The information collected through job analysis is used by the personnel department to prepare job descriptions, job specifications, and job standards. These form three important sub-systems of job analysis.

Job Analysis – Uses:

A comprehensive job analysis program is foundational for all functions and areas of personnel management and industrial relations. Its uses include:

• Employment: Guides manpower planning, recruitment, selection, placement, orientation, induction, and performance appraisal by providing information on duties, tasks, and responsibilities.
• Organization Audit: Reveals instances of poor organization affecting job design, acting as an organizational audit.
• Training and Development Programmes: Description of duties and equipment helps develop training and development content, identify training needs, and evaluate programs.
• Performance Appraisal: Helps establish job goals and define areas for appraisal, moving beyond rating general characteristics.
• Promotion and Transfer: Assists in charting promotion channels and identifying lateral transfer opportunities.
• Preventing Dissatisfaction and Settling Complaints: Provides a standard for preventing and resolving complaints related to workload, work nature, and procedures, including job description alterations.
• Discipline: Serves as a standard when considering discipline for non-standard performance.

Other use:

• Restriction of Employment Activity for Health Reasons and Early Retirement: Helps in situations where employees cannot maintain performance due to age or health, leading to early retirement or service retrenchment.
• Wage and Salary Administration: Forms the basis for job evaluation, which considers job content (tasks, duties, responsibilities, risks, hazards) to fix wage and salary levels.
• Health and Safety: Provides information on hazardous conditions, accident-prone areas, etc.
• Induction: Serves as a standard function by providing new employees with job information.
• Industrial Relations: Acts as a standard function for resolving industrial disputes and maintaining sound relations. A written job description is valuable in resolving controversies when employees attempt to alter listed duties, as it affects both labor union and management interests.

Despite these uses, job analysis also faces criticism.