Independent work

Conclusion
The above areas, at the same time, offer major opportunities for leadership, for responsibility, for recognition, and for learning. The employees who head these activities are important people in the work community. The people making the decisions in these areas are also forced to earn what management is and what is meant by the managerial responsibility. These employees are to learn that choices are to be made, priorities are to be set, and that the infinite number of things it is nice to have and are to be fitted to the available resources.
In the absence of such opportunities for leadership in the work community, the abilities, energies, and ambitions within the employees can be directed against management and against the work community. These are to have negative, destructive, and damaging effects. The one who can make the most trouble for the management becomes the leader rather than the one who can perform the best for the plant community. The shop leader considers that his role is shouting and harassing though their capacity and performance as a leader can be alternatively used in work communities. Responsibility is not by itself a guarantee of performance. But lack of responsibility breeds the firebrand leaders.
Work community activities
The list of activities for which a work community may be asked to take responsibility is almost endless. Management is required to impose systematically the responsibility for work-community decisions on the employees. Among these are such tasks as the control of manning assignments to cover for temporarily absent employees, selecting employees to serve on plant committees or task forces, screening and selecting employees to fill vacancies, and counseling employees who do not meet standards with respect to absences or punctuality and so on. Members of the plant community are also put on the plant safety committee. After all, safety is a concern of the employees in the plant, and they also know more about it than anybody else, as a rule, or at least know more about where the safety problems are.
Another example of self-government in a work community which can be given is that of a nuclear submarine. Obviously, a submarine cannot be a permissive place. The captain has to be the final authority whose word nobody dares dispute. Yet the crew acts and works as a single unit. No one can join the crew unless he is accepted by it. And while the captain decides what should be done, each man on his own station then has to decide how to do a specific job and do it as if the life of everybody depended on him, as indeed it does.