Is The Job Description An Endangered Species?
Several leading business journals have recently declared the job itself, as a vehicle for packaging work, to be on the endangered species list[i]. Commenting on the same phenomenon, Savage describes “the rigor mortis of the industrial era” where the division of work and managerial supervision represented “structured distrust.” As the industrial era is replaced by the knowledge era, he predicts, both jobs and managers will be gone[ii]. Thus, making the need for the position description redundant. While, this is, admittedly, a fairly radical stance, the Academy of Management Executive concurs:’ The practice of organizing work into fixed sets of tasks that are