Influence Of Strategic Job Design Techniques On Job Satisfaction Among State Corporations In Kenya

The greatest challenge facing organisations is whether their staffs are motivated to perform their duties and whether employees find their work interesting and meaningful. The ways jobs are designed have an important bearing to an employee‟s job satisfaction. Understanding job design techniques and their influence on motivation, job satisfaction and performance will lead organisations to keep the best employee pool for themselves and fend off competition from other organisations seeking to get talented employees from the already existing pool. Different strategies such as the more traditional job rotation and other conventional strategies like job enlargement and enrichment have been interchangeably used by organisations to make their employees motivated. State corporations in Kenya are not exception to this kind of job design. The objectives of this study were: to investigate the influence of job rotation strategy on job satisfaction among state corporations in Kenya, to determine how job enlargement strategy influences job satisfaction among state corporations in Kenya, to analyse job enrichment strategy and how it influences job satisfaction among state corporations in Kenya, and to evaluate the influence of flexible work arrangements strategy on job satisfaction among state corporations in Kenya. This study was based on several theories namely: Job Characteristics model, Hertzberg‟s two factor Hygiene theory,

Clayton Aldefer‟s ERG theory, equity theory, family-boarder theory, and boundary theory. The research design for this study was cross-sectional descriptive design. This research sought to interrogate the extent to which the state corporations employ these strategies and their influence on the job satisfaction and suggest possible areas of improvement. The target population was 187 state corporations. The unit of analysis was employees of the state corporations in Kenya. The research studied a sample size of 381 employees in 127 state corporations. The state corporations in Kenya were selected using stratified sampling while employees were purposively selected. To obtain the data, semi-structured questionnaires were used in this research. Data collected were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics with the aid of SPSS package. The findings of this study show that the most significant strategies in enhancing job satisfaction among state corporations in Kenya are job enlargement, job enrichment and flexible work arrangements. Job rotation strategy on the other hand was found not to have any significance on job satisfaction.