Assigned responsibilities are a valuable part of workplace organization. A manager, for example, cannot be effective if he or she is encumbered with office details such as billing, filing, and processing (Holt, 2003). Instead, the manager should be primarily occupied with management tasks, and those under him should be tasked with the detail work. This arrangement not only makes the manager more productive in his management tasks but gives his employees more autonomy in their jobs.
Another advantage of individual job responsibilities is that they encourage accountability. Employees know what they are expected to do and what they will be evaluated on, so the praise(or the blame(for the results will be credited to them. This tends to motivate employees to do their best (Carnegie-Mellon, p. 5).
Finally, clear-cut job responsibilities are a source of job satisfaction for employees. Employees who have no idea what they should be doing or how to get ahead on the job end up frustrated and demotivated fairly quickly. Giving employees more responsibility increases motivation ôso that they feel their contribution is more valuable to the business and that their role is of higher importanceö (Managerial Actions for Increased Motivation). Having assigned responsibilities provides employees and employers with a measurement criterion to determine how well the employee is doing on the job. As Margaret Wheatley points out, the old adage ôYou can only manage what you can measureö needs to be considered in light of the fact that measurement in itself does not produce winning behaviors. Yet Wheatley concedes that measurement is critical because it provides feedback, and ôFeedback is life-sustainingö (Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers, 1999).
No workplace can function effectively without responsibilities, and no employee is effective unless informed about what his responsibilities are.
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