Job Design and Work Evaluation Programme: Quality of Working Life

The Job Design and Work Evaluation Programme was an umbrella programme of evaluation of a number of projects already being undertaken by members of the Tavistock Institute, or already in preparation for the Tavistock Institute to work on. It was an action research programme, mainly within the socio-technical framework and brought together a number of individual projects into a wider programme to derive common principles and techniques for job design and work organisation.

The programme was overseen by the Work Research Unit of the Department of Employment and the central focus was on the content of jobs, their organisation, and its effect on individual satisfaction in order to add new dimensions to existing work on the better use of manpower and the improvement of the working environment.

The role of the Tavistock Institute was to develop a general evaluative model to be used by practitioners and researchers concerned with job and organisational change and to aid in the application of the model to a small number of contrasting projects in which the Institute was already engaged.