The effects of flexible job design and incentive plans on productivity

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A core element of flexible job design is job rotation--the systematic movement of employees from one job to another--where the employee is given a breadth of exposure to a wide range of operations. One of the benefits of job rotation is improved motivation for employees. An incentive plan-- reward for good performance-- is another management tool to increase the motivation level of employees. This proposed research will consider the two factors of job rotation and incentive plans, both in isolation and in combination. Job rotation has been studied in many fields and it is known to have several advantages such as reduced boredom and improved motivation, improved social interaction and collegiality among employees, and increased skills that can make employees more versatile and marketable resulting in their increased job security. Depending on the complexity of the model, mathematical programming or metaheuristics will be used to solve this part of the problem. Another part of this proposed research deals with incentive plans. The proposed research considers incentive plans as an external factor that can improve motivation beyond what job rotation can do. For this part of the research, a combination of analytical models and simulation models will be used. The last part of this research deals with the integration of the above two parts. Job rotation and incentive plans can interact if they are applied simultaneously. An integrated model in which both of these plans are present can show the relative effect of each of these plans and provide a platform for comparing these management strategies. In order to effectively model the interactions among different factors, an agent-based simulation approach will be used for this integrated model. Agent-based simulation enables the use of autonomous agents that can make individual and independent decisions based on a set of predefined rules. Agent-based modelling, in particular, is very useful when human behaviours such as motivation, competition, learning, forgetting, memory, adaptation, aggravation, satisfaction, and frustration are involved.