Skill variety

Ability/skill variety The job requires a variety of knowledge, skills,... 

Teamwork can enrich jobs through different mechanisms. Skill variety can be increased from both project activity and one s role within the team. Activities such as data collection and analysis, problem solving, presenting information to groups, and group decision making are key elements in quality-related teamwork, which may not be part of workers daily routines. Team projects can typically be expected to increase the variety of stimuli to which employees are exposed (Rafaeli 1985). 

Both interview and questionnaire techniques were used in this survey. Fifty, semi-structured interviews were conducted on-site with a randomly selected, representative, stratified sample of employees. (See Appendix B for an example of some of the prompt questions used in the interview note that this can only be developed after some open interviews/discussion sessions are completed.) A questiormaire was generated from the interview data and distributed to 520 staff to be completed anonymously. This produced a 45 per cent usable response rate for analysis. The objectives were to gain an understanding of the perceptions of quality within the company and readiness for change to provide baseline data for evaluation purposes to identify quality improvement opportunities and potential barriers to change and to help management develop a sense of awareness about quality and quality improvement needs in the plant. The questionnaire included measures of job satisfaction (Warr et aL, 1979), organizational commitment (Porter et al., 1974), perceptions of cooperation and morale in the plant and measures of certain job characteristics associated with quality work performance, such as skill variety, autonomy and feedback (Hackman and Oldham, 1975). 

Skill variety (requiring the deployment of a multiplicity of skills)... 

The principal objective of technical service in the chemical industry is to provide timely and professional information and support to downstream customers regarding chemical products and thek uses. It is neither cost-effective nor necessary for a consumer of chemical products to develop a staff of speciahsts having detailed expertise in all aspects of chemical raw materials and thek uses, particularly in a time of increa singly complex and rapidly technologically driven economies. Rather, this variety of expertise is provided in the chemical marketplace by technical service professionals whose knowledge and skills are made available by chemical products suppHers. As such, successful chemical companies provide technical service as a critical element of thek offerings to the marketplace making use of this aspect of the value chain to enhance thek competitiveness. 

Many firms tend to staff their technical service efforts with personnel that have experience solely in the particular business involved. It is often of value to consider individuals having experience in related industries, both to provide a different set of skills and to provide a different perspective than that of in-house experts. This is particularly important in the specialty chemicals arena, where formulations experience is generally of paramount importance. This variety of knowledge is often largely experiential, as much of the treatment and behaviors of formulations in the chemical industry are empirical or experience-based rather than quantitatively understood. It is therefore extremely difficult to train personnel ia dealing with the often nebulous aspects of formulations technology. 

The quality of flour used ia the production of yeast-raised products depends on several factors, including the quality and characteristics of the wheat variety, the environmental conditions under which the wheat was grown, the skill of the miller in separating the endosperm of the wheat kernel from the germ and bran, and the proper treatment of the flour in the mill. 

Field test kits have been used with success on many sites for a variety of contaminants. The types of test kits available and their continued use appear to be a wave of the future. Certainly, the skills of the sampling technician and field test kit user are two very important areas for consideration. 

As process plants become more complex, it becomes apparent that it is not possible to rely exclusively on the process worker s skills and memory required to perform the task. Job aids and procedures are devices which aim to reduce the need for human retention of procedures and references as well as the amount of decision making required. Job aids assume a variety of formats including flowcharts, checklists, decision tables, etc., while procedures refer to other systems of documentation such as standard operating instmctions and emergency procedures. 

What this adds up to is simply the fact that your study of organic chemistry must integrate the general with the specific. You must not only learn general patterns but also how to apply them to specific molecules, and you must also learn the behavior of specific molecules in order to see where patterns come from. These skills can be learned in a variety of ways, but one of the most effective learning techniques is to study models of molecules that duplicate their size, shape, stability, and other chemically important properties. That is where this workbook comes in. 

The principal aims of security should be to forestall both organized and opportunist crime by cost-effective measures. While there is considerable variety in the type of criminal attack and skills involved, fortunately there is a tendency for them to act in a similar way, and this enables a common philosophy to be applied when determining countermeasures. 

The seven mentors attended a 2-day intensive workshop that looked at the nature of mentoring, the skills required, and how to manage the relationship. The mentees had a 1-day workshop, with the mentors joining them towards the end of the day. The second day of the mentors workshop involved a variety of role-plays designed by the participants themselves to reflect the kind of issues they had already encountered between the cultures. 

Particularly if the industry is government regulated (i.e., pharmaceuticals), but also if the supply contract with the customer stipulates numerical specification limits for a variety of quality indieators, the compliance question is legal in nature (rules are set for the method, the number of samples and repeat determinations) the analyst can then only improve precision by honing his/her skills,... 

Then he swiftly produced as many different varieties of the compounds as possible, including dimethylzinc, which convinced other scientists to accept Avogadro s theory, a foundation of atomic chemistry and methyl-mercury iodide, the first of many organomercury compounds known to poison people who eat mercury-contaminated fish. Despite his skill at synthesis, Frankland did not discover tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive that became one of the most important industrial compounds of the mid-twentieth century (Chapter 6). 

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