Reshaping the Concepts of Job Enrichment and Job Enlargement: The Impacts of Lean and Industry 4.0

The latest innovations in the manufacturing technologies significantly affected the roles of workers, both concerning task variety and required skills. Consequently, in a highly digitalised context, operators and managers are facing increasingly job enlargement and job enrichment requirements in order to perform new and different activities and functions. This paper aims at exploring how the concepts of job enrichment and job enlargement have been evolving over time, through a systematic review of the literature. From the analysis, it emerged that the concepts have been enriched with broader meanings according to the two different production paradigms, in particular with the introduction of Lean Manufacturing principles up to the introduction of the Industry 4.0. The study highlights that if the lean principles strongly promoted the idea of enlarging and enriching the workers’ activities to promote their involvement and motivation, supporting leadership attitude and soft skills, additionally the Industry 4.0 significantly affected an enlargement of tasks in space and time, requiring enriched technical skills to manage complex digitized processes.