Research Highlight

How ChatGPT Can and Can’t Help Managers Design Better Job Roles

Many leaders don’t know how to design healthy, productive roles. ChatGPT proves effective here, when used wisely.

Fangfang Zhang and Sharon K. Parker Reading Time: 11 min 

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Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images

Today’s leaders are pushing to increase employee engagement and decrease turnover but face a harsh reality: widespread employee burnout. To fight it, managers need to offer employees more healthy and meaningful work. In surveys conducted in the United States by Gallup in 2022, 40% of employees reported that their job had a negative impact on their mental health, and around 30% said they frequently experience burnout. Moreover, U.S. employee engagement hit a seven-year low, with only 32% of workers polled by Gallup saying they were engaged and 17% saying they were actively disengaged in 2022.1 Globally, employees’ lack of engagement has been estimated to cost employers $7.8 trillion — equivalent to 11% of the global gross domestic product.2

The root causes of disengagement and work stress often lie in how an organization has designed people’s jobs. Decades of extensive research consistently link poor work design with negative employee outcomes, including mental strain, high turnover, job dissatisfaction, decreased productivity, and impaired learning.3 Many companies are now striving to do better.

Unfortunately, our research indicates that many managers lack the necessary understanding to design high-quality jobs. This is where artificial intelligence technologies such as ChatGPT could play a key role, by bridging the manager knowledge gap and helping design high-quality work that benefits both employees and organizations. However, it is important for managers to first understand the pros and cons of using ChatGPT for work design. Let’s explore some takeaways for managers that our research has revealed.

Managerial Challenges: Mundane and Unfulfilling Jobs

What factors determine whether a job is high quality? The SMART work design model, a framework created by Sharon K. Parker, defines high-quality work as work that is stimulating (jobs with task variety and a chance to develop new skills), incorporates mastery (such as role clarity and job feedback), is agentic (such as job autonomy and change participation), is relational (where social support and positive teamwork are available), and is tolerable (with manageable work hours and reasonable levels of time pressure).4

Despite the benefits of well-designed jobs, poorly designed ones are still prevalent. According to the Gallup 2019 Great Jobs Survey, only 40% of employed Americans are engaged in jobs that possess SMART characteristics.

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About the Authors

Fangfang Zhang, Ph.D., is a research fellow at the Centre for Transformative Work Design at Curtin University. She is also a CEPAR (Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research) research fellow. Her research interests include work design, job crafting, future of work, overqualification, and aging. Sharon K. Parker is a John Curtin Distinguished Professor at Curtin University, an Australian Research Council laureate fellow, and director of the Centre for Transformative Work Design. She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Science and the Society for Industrial and Organisational Psychology. She is the creator of the SMART model and cofounder of the Thrive at Work initiative.

References

1. B. Wigert and R. Pendell, “6 Trends Leaders Need to Navigate This Year,” Jan. 31, 2023, Gallup, www.gallup.com.

2. Ibid.

3. S.K. Parker, “Beyond Motivation: Job and Work Design for Development, Health, Ambidexterity, and More,” Annual Review of Psychology 65 (January 2014): 661-691.

4. S.K. Parker, “Smart Work Design,” Safeguard, May/June 2022, 50-53.

5. J. Rothwell and S. Crabtree, “Not Just a Job: New Evidence on the Quality of Work in the United States,” PDF file (Washington, D.C.: Gallup, 2019), www.gallup.com.

6. Ibid.

7. S.K. Parker, D.M. Andrei, and A. Van den Broeck, “Poor Work Design Begets Poor Work Design: Capacity and Willingness Antecedents of Individual Work Design Behavior,” Journal of Applied Psychology 104, no. 7 (July 2019): 907-928.

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Comment (1)
Trish Polak
There are many risks to this approach that must be addressed first.  First and foremost, employers should not design jobs they are not ready for and the organisation does not have the business maturity to support.  ChatGPT can design the optimal job, however if managers are not open to what that actually means; specifically the autonomy of the role, the feedback and engagement it provides the worker, and actually having to respect and act on the workers feedback, this approach can do more damage than it solves.  
Secondly, clear objectives needs to be established (start with the end state in mind), create optimised operational processes, provide the tools for these processes, assess the risk and controls, and then, and only then, identify the skills required for the role and the capabilities.  Then you will be able to match the right person to the role.
Finally, consider the natural evolution of a role when the worker is empowered to own the role.  It is human nature to always find the most efficient way to get from A to B.  Your worker will establish operational optimisation when simply given the freedom to.  The role of the manager is then to listen to the worker, and proactively remove barriers to the workers success.  Many workers are happy to do mundane repeatable tasks and go home, not all workers want to excel and develop in their roles.  Control and predictability give a sense of comfort to workers, and they find stimulation in the work place through work place culture, interactions, and respect though a sense of being heard and valued - The Whistle While You Work environment.  
The two foundational requirements for worker satisfaction has always been "being heard" and "being valued".  The rest is matching the right person to the right role, not all workers want to be challenged, climb the ladder or invest their time and energy in their work, while some are fully invested and want to be defined by their career.  It is important to respect and assess the worker motivation when aligning the job to the person.