Contemporary Issues in

organizational Management

Submitted to:
Sir. Suleman Anwer

Submitted by:
Sehar Waleed 17161038
Work design studies in the manufacturing and service industries
Abstract:
This paper aims to focus on the importance and value ability of the work design as in any
business plan or organization, the work design plays an important role because planning
is an integral part of any act to be conducted. Work design gives an appropriate way,
clearance and guidance to carry out any activity. This study throws light on the efficiency
of work designs in any organizations.

Introduction:
Work design in the manufacturing industries:
Work design or task design is an important factor which is adopted by many large and
successful organizations in order to gain maximum profits as they design the structure
and work division in such a way that the employees may not get suffocate form the task
assign to them as well as they could also perform the activities that are helpful in
generating the maximum of the profits.
The highly specialized manufacturing organizations adopt systematic work design system
that helps in the maximum outputs from least inputs followed by the maximum profits.
Such are the organizations that create marks on the history and set examples for the rest
including they may also be known as trend setters but not the trend followers.
Work design is the core or basic function of the human resource management that is
related to the specification of contents, relationship and methods of job in order to satisfy
the technological, personal and other job requirements.
The manufacturing firms, as said by one of the highly revered consultant of ex-Toyota
that manufacturing firms seek profits of 35 to 40 % of the productivity gain over three to
five years as a measure of success in their current lean efforts. He went on to say that
manufacturers should be actually focusing on a 400 percent improvement in productivity
over 10 years to achieve the path to becoming lean. Why is there such a large disparity in
measuring success?
Design for services:
Services are complex, hybrid artefacts. They are made up of things – places and systems
of communication and interaction – but also of human beings and their organizations.
They therefore belong to the physics of natural and technical systems and to biology, but
also to sociology and the culture of human beings. Permeated with human activity as they
are, with a network of relationships between people, and people and things at their center,
they can never be reduced to the simplicity of mechanical entities.
Like all complex entities they are largely un-designable. On the other hand, for this very
reason, precisely because they appear to be un-designable, it is both useful and necessary
today to develop a new, service-oriented design culture and practice. To justify such a
statement, which may appear paradoxical, we must trace a pathway that leads us from
twentieth-century design to that of the twenty-first and which can be summed up as the
loss of the illusion of control, or the discovery of complexity.
A loss and a discovery that have influenced the culture and practice of design in general,
but which we will discuss here with particular reference to service design. The change in
design culture obviously reflects a wider change: the ongoing transition towards an
economy based on services, networks and sustainability; a new economy that is not as yet
the present (as the mainstream is still dominated by the economy of the twentieth
century). However, it is no longer only one of many possibilities for the future. What is
emerging is the economy of the twenty-first century or, for us today, the next economy.

Literature review:
The extant evidence provides considerable evidence for the direct contribution of
workforce, managerial and marketing skills to innovation and exporting, although the
literature on SMEs specifically is relatively limited (Brambilla et al., 2012; Freel, 2005;
Knight and Kim, 2009; Leiponen, 2005). Analyses (Herrmann and Peine, 2011) of
national competitiveness suggest a broad agreement that firms require distinctly different
skill sets to pursue different market strategies. Different skill needs are also evident for
firms adopting different exporting strategies; one recent study noted that firms exporting
to competitive, high-income countries employed more skilled workers (Brambilla et al.,
2012).
The skills needed for innovation and exporting also differ at different stages of the value
chain; for example, technical staff or creative staff may play a key role in the early,
developmental stages of an innovation project, but marketing staff are likely to be more
important in terms of commercialization (Herrmann and Peine, 2011).
In-house R&D plays a crucial role in a firm’s ability to generate new knowledge which
may provide the basis for proprietary intellectual property (IP) and innovation
(Blackburn, 2003; Griffith et al., 2003). In broadly based studies of the determinants of
innovation, R&D capability is almost always strongly and positively linked to innovation
outputs, a relationship which is stronger in research-intensive industries (Crepon et al.,
1998; Love et al., 2009; Roper et al., 2008). Even in low-tech manufacturing and service
sectors, where R&D might be thought to be less important, the evidence suggests positive
R&D–innovation relationships.
Less comprehensive evidence exists on the links between design and export outcomes.
There is some evidence that export results are stronger where firms orient their product
design explicitly towards the needs of international customers (MacPherson, 2000).
Indicative evidence also suggests that in supplier-dominated industries, investments in
design and productive efficiency may have a stronger influence on export success than
investments in internal R&D or external knowledge gathering (Flor and Oltra, 2005).
Literature gap:
It can be seen in many organizations that the R&D id playing a vital role but does it
necessarily implemented in the developing countries like Pakistan?
Also it is observed that the R&D is mainly working in the larger firm or organizations but
its existence is not sure in the small enterprise. The work design is not being made sure as
people are not clear about where to invest and other financial related decisions. As to the
factor of lack of interest, it creates insecurities for people to invest in such organizations
like that of insurance companies because of the factor that people are not given awareness
about the working of the organizations. Another factor included in this regard is that the
people who invested in the multinational are not getting their share as per their
investments.

Concept of Gamification:
In the regard of work design, a concept of gamification is introduced which states to
make hard things and typical elements in life easier and fun.
Regardless of the attention the term quickly gained in the industry, academia has been
slow to react.
Electronic commerce and electronic markets are one of the main areas where service
marketing and technology intertwine. According to Alt et al. 2010, service-oriented
solutions can bring many benefits to electronic commerce and technology in several areas
such as healthcare (see e.g. Cocosila and Archer 2010), telecommunication (see e.g.
Czarnecki et al. 2010), logistics, education and others. While gamification has become
one of the most popular trends of electronic markets and commerce, understanding it
from the service marketing perspective could bring proven models from service
marketing to the development of “gamified” services.
On the basis of the literature, we define gamification in the following way:
Gamification refers to a process of enhancing a service with affordances for gameful
experiences in order to support users’ overall value creation.
Conclusions and Policy Recommendations:
The research evidence that employers, employees, shareholders, and customers can
simultaneously benefit from work practices that enhance worker motivation, human
capital, a social capital is robust across a wide range of industries. At the same time, such
practices cannot be implemented in a “cookbook” manner but instead must be tailored to
particular industries and work settings. The evidence is clear-cut: achieving and
sustaining world-class levels of performance requires an integrated approach to capital
investment, investment in and introduction of new technologies, and implementation of
high performance workplace practices tailored to the specific industry and technology.
Policymakers can support the development and widespread adoption of such practices by
linking them directly to economic or technological investments that are made to support a
sustainable path for economic growth. To ensure that high- performance work practices
diffuse more broadly across the economy and produce benefits for both employers and
employees, we propose that these efforts be sponsored jointly by the Department of
Commerce and the Department of Labor.

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