Analysis of the Junior Merchandisers (juniors) of an Apparel Buying office in Retail Industry Is Conducted Through Examining Their Job Characteristics

Analysis of the junior merchandisers (juniors) of an apparel buying office in retail industry is conducted through examining their job characteristics.

Most juniors in the buying office are fresh graduates with less working experience and job relevant skills, they must conduct extensive learning to the organization and able to provide the necessary support to the senior merchandisers (seniors). The primary duties and responsibilities of juniors are to support seniors in product merchandising activities. For instance, they assist in developing departmental strategy for business growth based on industry trend and forecast. More specifically, they coordinate with particular foreign buyer and seller to develop seasonal goods, prepare advance samples, identify and report merchandising issues in a timely manner. Meanwhile, seniors delegate a routine work and provide practical guidelines that regulate how juniors are perfectly aligned with the company’s goals. Through critical observation in the role of junior merchandisers, it can be a challenging and demanding job. The compulsory job duties and mandatory on-the-job training is needed in order to increase junior’s engagement and job satisfaction. In fact, juniors are inherent followers and feel comfortable to execute the assigned tasks. However, it can be boring if they have been doing the same job for years. When junior’s experiences and behaviors tend to decrease, it will negatively affect their work engagement and overall performance as well as dissatisfied with their job. This case study provides the explanation to the above dilemma. It indicates that seniors is responsible for tracking their subordinates’ performance and has a key role to play in examining how to motivate their subordinates in the workplace through the job enrichment program.

The job characteristic model is a widespread management practice that focuses on job designing, it aims to increase employee’s levels of intrinsic motivation, improve their overall skill level and productivity. Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham proposes an explicit framework for enriching job, they emphasis that the task itself is essential to the employee motivation as a whole. The model assumes that jobs can be designed not only to help employees feel that they are doing purposeful and valuable work but also to get enjoyment from their jobs. With the use of this conceptual model, it makes seniors able to investigate the major intrinsic motivation factor (e.g., a boring and monotonous job stifles motivation to perform well) that can influence their subordinates’ attitude and behavior. Through the job re-designing approach, it can improve junior’s engagement at work by learning about the importance of their personalities and how they perform their tasks.

There are five components of job characteristics which is skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback. Moreover, it generates three critical psychological states such as the employees must feel personal responsibility for the outcomes of the jobs, the job must be experienced as meaningful by the employees and they must be aware of how effective they are converting their effort into performance.

Skill variety implies that the variety of job or task that involves various skills and talents are required. For instance, seniors may delegate new tasks to their subordinates apart from the routine jobs (e.g., follow up ad-hoc project on seasonal goods). In this circumstance, it encourages juniors to increase their effort and challenge when they engage with different group of participants in managing the project. Juniors are required various new techniques (e.g., communication skills and product knowledge) for enhancing their competency in responding to the tasks. Likewise, seniors share experience, provide adequate support and assistance to their subordinates to achieve desirable outcome.