Job Knowledge Leads to Employees Making Better Work Decisions

Employees who do not have a clear understanding of how their jobs fit into the overall work picture of their organization are more likely to exhibit carelessness and the inability to make clear distinctions on which aspects of their job are most important when making ratings about their work assignments, according to a study conducted by two DePaul University industrial-organizational psychologists.

"This study clearly shows that employees vary greatly with regard to how accurately they understand the critical function of their jobs," said Erich C. Dierdorff and Robert S. Rubin, both professors in the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business at DePaul.




Not only is an understanding of work role requirements useful to human resource managers, but clarity of one's role and responsibilities can greatly impact work motivation, satisfaction and performance of individual workers, as well.


In their study they focused on two aspects of how employees rated their jobs. The first was carelessness, which is when employees are more likely to think certain aspects of their jobs are more important than others, when in fact they are not. For example, a person whose work does not provide the opportunity to have much interaction with co-workers and little, if any, with customers, lists interpersonal skills as highly important to the job, then that person is being careless in providing an accurate judgment, Dierdorff noted.

The second is being able to discriminate as to which job requirements are more important. "If, for example, there are 15 key skills required for a job, can the person make the fine-grain distinctions between those requirements? If asked if oral or written communication skills are more important to that position, can the employee make an accurate distinction between these two different skills?"


And they concluded that it did.

They found there can be a wide variance in work role ratings and not all of it is due to differences in jobs. Much of it comes from the different perceptions people have about their jobs, even if they perform similar work, when making their ratings.

"People who perform a job often do not agree with others on what is important or what is needed to perform the job," Dierdorff said.

These kinds of variables in job ratings are an indication that employees are not on the same page when understanding their work roles. "That's a clear signal that management needs to clarify work roles and provide training to minimize the differences and impact the quality of decisions based upon factors important to the organization," Dierdorff noted.

Surprisingly, the person performing the job may not provide the best quality information about that job. "I know that's contrary to logic, but studies have found that professional analysts can delineate the most important attributes and provide more accurate job-related information that management can use when making important personnel decisions," Dierdorff said.


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