Job design — the deliberate structuring of what a role actually contains — is becoming the decisive factor in whether AI adoption and flexible work arrangements improve or degrade the working experience. The good news is that the question of what makes a job motivating has a well-established theoretical answer. In 1976, Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham developed the Job Characteristics Model, which "has since become the basis for many job enrichment strategies," as career-skills resource Mind Tools explains. Combine that model with a structured process of deconstructing, redeploying, and reconstructing tasks, and managers gain both a diagnostic lens and a practical method for rebuilding roles around automation and flexible arrangements.
The Foundation of Motivating Work: The Job Characteristics Model
The model's premise is that motivation is not primarily a product of personality, pay, or perks. It is built into the structure of the job itself. As the work design resource at Work Design Research explains, simplified jobs can be redesigned to be more meaningful and motivating, and the theory underlying those efforts matters because it forces designers to "really think about the underlying principles when looking at work structures." The Job Characteristics Model is described there as a prominent model in the work design literature.
Hackman and Oldham's original question was pointedly practical. HR writer Suzanne Lucas notes that their primary goal in developing the model "was to determine why employees eventually lost interest in their jobs." The answer they proposed is a causal chain: specific, alterable features of a job shape three internal psychological states, and those states in turn drive measurable outcomes such as engagement, satisfaction, and performance. That chain is what turns the model from description into a design tool.
