al needs and over time brought about its own set of concerns with respect to job design.
The new global economy has caused new models of organizational design to emerge and has predicted the end of the concept of the ôjobö as people came to know it in the middle to latter part of the twentieth century. The traditional work structure is morphing into a new structure that reflects process, time-based, network cultures illustrating the evolving roles of people and organizational relationships. As organizations undergo redesign and become less functionally oriented, jobs become far less easy to define. Teamwork is changing the levels of roles, skills, and competencies as is the Internet. All of this is combining to eliminate the traditional work structure. A major issue associated with the concept of the traditional work structure is that of the employee and how they will make the transition to more of a ôknowledge-basedö content to employment. As such, jobs are becoming obsolete, mainly because of dissatisfaction on the part of workersùnot employers (Pierce, 1997).
Employees respond best when employers understand the importance of peer presence and networking. It is necessary for employees to identify with a profession, and they are much more sensitive to criticism when it comes from a peer as opposed to that which is derived from management.
An environment that has a meaningful challenge is also a necessity to a healthy work environment. Most knowledge workers prefer challenging work in an average physical environment to mundane work in a terrific environment (Pierce, 1997). They also prefer to not focus on who is in charge. Instead they use a more effective approach in that they prefer to define the work required, identify the key elements and then distribute the task to small, interlocked teams with defined leadership, goals, schedules and accountability. Enlarging the job to encompass a larger task with grea...