Consider the work experiences you have had. Did you have one consistent job or did you have multiple roles?

a. Describe the work situation and explain whether you had one set of job duties or engaged in various roles.

b. If you played various roles, what triggered a change from one role to another? If you had a single set of job duties, why wasn’t a role-based approach taken?

c. From an employee perspective, are there advantages to the role-based approach? Describe. Are there disadvantages? Explain.

d. From an employer perspective, are there advantages and disadvantages to the role-based approach? In particular, does the appraisal process become more difficult? How could this be handled?

e. Overall, do you think viewing performance as a single set of job duties or multiple performance roles is a better approach to evaluating performance? Why?

People have jobs to do, right? There are jobs that must be done in organizations; however, in many of today’s organizations it might be useful to think about different roles that employees can play rather than those employees all doing the exact same job.

1. Consider, for instance, the job of professor. The job of professor is typically conceived of as consisting of three primary dimensions: research, teaching, and service. The research dimension involves conducting studies and publishing in scholarly journals. As a student, you are well aware of the teaching dimension.

2. Teaching involves delivering material to students, traditionally in a classroom setting. The service dimension refers to contributing to efforts both inside and outside of the university, such as chairing a college committee, working with student groups, and speaking to a parent’s group. A university professor must adequately perform on all three dimensions in order to achieve tenure and to be awarded merit pay.

3. The reality is that not all professors enjoy or perform on each of the three dimensions of research, teaching, and service equally well. As you may have noticed, some professors excel in the class- room and others, well, it’s not their forté. Some professors excel at research, whereas others find research to be a constant struggle. Some professors shun service and are not very good organizational citizens, whereas others embrace making service contributions, recognizing that they are necessary for the university to function.

4. What if it was in your power to redefine the job of professor? There might be some advantage to recognizing that the job really consists of three distinct roles. For example, you might take the best of your researchers and let them focus on the role of researcher. The professors in this role might have minimal teaching and service responsibilities so that they could focus on what they do best—research. Similarly, teaching and service could be roles that other professors could emphasize. What would be the advantage of this role-based approach? Students could have the best teachers, the university would have the best researchers producing knowledge, and the community would benefit by having the best organizational citizens working on service-related projects. In short, performance could be maximized because people would be doing what they are best at.

5. The role-based approach also makes sense in workplaces that experience a great deal of change. Due to competitive pressures or changes in technology, many jobs today require workers to take on various duties and shift from one focus, or task, to another. The workplace is more dynamic and changeable than ever before. However, people naturally seem to gravitate to particular roles that they do well. These roles can be consistent, even though tasks and technology involved in the job may change. For example, one worker may be the innovator and focus on coming up with new ideas and solutions. Another worker might be the technical expert and be relied on to know details about processes and how to get things done. Yet another worker might be a leader and move the team toward improved performance. All of these workers, however, may have the same job title. Traditional performance appraisal based on a job description may not, in this type of situation, adequately capture how the workers are really contributing to the organization.

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