Job design and employee engagement in selected manufacuturing companies in Nigeria

Highly engaged workforce can increase innovation, productivity, and bottom-line performance when their jobs are well designed. Job design represents the delineation of task responsibility as dictated by organizational strategy, technology and structure. This study explores the effect of job design on employee engagement using the social exchange theory. The study considers the relationship between the variables of job design which include skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback on employee engagement. The study employed cross-sectional survey design. Stratified sampling technique was used to get the sample size. Questionnaire was used to elicit information from respondents. Pearson product moment correlation was adopted as a statistical tool for data analysis. Based on the data from the survey investigation of employees across three manufacturing companies in Nigeria, the results revealed that there is a significant positive relationship between job design and employee engagement. The study therefore recommends that management need to pay more attention to job design, by creating more opportunity for workers to contribute.