The BASK names four job-design techniques. Every item in this unit is a scenario asking which one. Sort them by direction: deeper, wider, across, or simpler.
The four techniques
Job enrichment, job enlargement, job rotation, work simplification.
- Job enrichment: deepens the role vertically by adding decision authority and autonomy.
- Job enlargement: broadens the role horizontally by adding more tasks at the same level of responsibility.
- Job rotation: moves the employee across different jobs.
- Work simplification: reduces complexity, motions and decision load in a task.
Distractor lists: job analysis, job evaluation, job pricing and job posting are analysis and compensation activities. Job sharing, telework and compressed schedules are flexible work arrangements, not job design. Mentoring, coaching and stretch assignments are development methods.
Reading the scenarios
- A technician given authority to schedule his own calls and sign off on his own quality checks: enrichment. Authority and self-direction is the vertical signal.
- A claims processor who handled only intake now also doing document verification and correspondence, all at the same level of responsibility: enlargement. The phrase "same level of responsibility" explicitly rules out enrichment.
- A high-error assembly step redesigned to remove unnecessary motions and reduce the number of decisions the operator makes: work simplification. It is the opposite of both expansions.
- Analysts who say work is repetitive with no path to broader skills, and a plan to expose them systematically to several different roles: job rotation. Enlargement adds tasks within one job; enrichment adds authority within the existing role; neither gives cross-role exposure. Simplification would deepen the monotony they report.
Carry in the one-word test: more authority is enrichment, more tasks is enlargement, more jobs is rotation, less complexity is simplification.