Managers are often found to locate an employee who is good at a particular job or whose competency is well-known in the organization and assign him/her a job that challenges his/her talents and thereby sustain his/her interests, all in the fond hope of improving organizational productivity. It is strongly believed that a challenging job kindles interest and enthusiasm in the employees besides providing a sense of achievement when the job is done. This sense of achievement is expected to lead to `job satisfaction' and through this means organizations are hoping to retain employees' loyalty.

It is thus increasingly being realized that unless employees are truly happy with their current job, they would not be committed to their work. It is in this context that Butlar and Waldroop pointed out in their article that unless a manager attempts to satisfy the deeply embedded `life interests' of an employee no job satisfaction can ever be attained by the employee. This objective they propose to achieve more affectively by using `job sculpting' as a tool.

Job sculpting touches the very deep and innate core of the human desire. It goes beyond the commonly perceived expectation of "doing what one is good at". These life interests are considered to be "long-held, emotionally-driven passions, intricately entwined with personality and thus born of an indeterminate mix of nature and nurture." These life interests do not merely determine what one is good at, but they essentially define one's love for a particular kind of job. It is, therefore, essential for a manager to identify those deeply embedded, 'life-interests' of an employee and sculpt the job or his/her assignment in such a way that it makes a best fit for the employee to express himself fully. This "double bind" kind of process makes job sculpting more an art than a science demanding all the time in the world of a manager to unearth those hidden interests and build a symmetry between the individual and his/her job to ensure job-satisfaction, and in turn capitalize on the potential of the employee.

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