Knowledge Is Power: Employees with “high role ambiguity” in their jobs are
apt to make more mistakes, largely because of carelessness and an inability to
prioritize job tasks, say a pair of industrial psychologists at DePaul
University. Professors Erich C. Dierdorff and Robert S. Rubin studied 203
workers in 73 occupations and uncovered wide variances in how people within the
same job view their responsibilities.
Workers’ perceptions about their job requirements and performance have
implications for job design, skills evaluation, employee training and
performance management. “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,” write Dierdorff and Rubin, who published
their findings in a recent issue of Personnel Psychology.
Their study, which can be downloaded for a fee,
examined two aspects of how employees rate their jobs. The first was
carelessness, which occurs “when employees are more likely to think certain
aspects of their jobs are more important than others, when in fact they are
not.” The example used is an employee whose job does not afford interaction with
co-workers or customers, yet who lists interpersonal skills as highly important.
The employee thus is “being careless in providing an accurate judgment.”
The second aspect, which the authors term “discriminability,” refers to
employees being unable to “make the fine-grain distinctions” between the value
attached to the numerous skills required for a job.
The findings are a “clear signal that management needs to clarify work roles
and provide training” to ensure employees have the knowledge to make the correct
decisions, based on corporate goals.
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