Independent work

Need for clear authority
Another thing which is required to make the responsibility acceptable to the employee is that he needs to have the security of a clear authority structure. He is required to know what areas and decisions are beyond his power and beyond his purview and hence reserved for a different or a higher authority. Management has to work out what the task is, what the objectives are, what the standards are. Again, the doer is to be used as a source of information. But the job is of management.
Also, organization stands under the threat of the ‘common threat’. Always there is the chance of an emergency situation which has not been anticipated and for which there are no rules. The common threat can be physical, while in the organization it is more often be economic. Whatever its nature, an employee has to make the decision in such a situation, and fast or everyone is endangered. Who this employee is has to be known in advance, otherwise there is chaos. And this employee has to be able to say that this needs to be done and it is to be done in this way. The survival of the group depends on his undisputed authority. Without it, no one in the work group can feel secure.
Responsibility for Job and work groups
The plan of individual jobs to do the work and to meet its standards, and the design, structure, and relationship of the work group in which these jobs are integrated into a community, are to be the responsibility of employees and work group. The employees require professional help, knowledge, experience, and teaching from their supervisor. They require guidance and service from the industrial engineer and from many other technicians and professionals. However, the management is to retain a veto power, and is to exercise it frequently.
But the responsibility for job design and work group design belongs to those who are responsible for output and performance, which means that it is the employee and the work group. Employee’s responsibility for job and group varies greatly with the kind of work to be done, with the education, skill, and knowledge level of the employees, and with cultures and traditions. But the principles are the same. The employee and his group are responsible for, their own jobs and for the relationships between individual jobs. They are responsible for thinking through how the work is to be done, for meeting performance goals, for quality as well as for quantity, for improving work, job, tools and processes, and their own skills. These are demanding requirements. Yet whenever these are made, they are needed to be met with the required planning. Indeed in most cases, employees set higher performance goals than the industrial engineer and tend to outdo their own goals.
The reason is neither that the work has become fun, nor just the motivation, though psychological factors certainly play an important part. In large measure, employee’s responsibility for job design and work-group design are effective since these make use of the employee’s knowledge and experience in the one area where he is the expert.
To expect employee’s creativity in making work productive is without sense. But it is realistic to expect knowledge and expertise with respect to the employee’s own job, that is, in putting conceptual and physical tools into use and performance. Here the employee is the only expert. For a job is a configuration. It defies analysis. But it is easily accessible to perception. Particularly if feedback information is provided, the individual can normally work out his own optimal job design fairly fast and fairly effectively. In case of the design of the work group, responsibility on the part of the members is even more important. It is known that the work itself is a vital factor in job design and work-group structure. But it is not known what job design and work-group structure corresponds to this or that task and work.
In retrospect, the way every one of the work groups organizes itself is obvious and right. But nothing can be deduced from one such solution for the optimal structure and organization of the next job. There are general rules. But they are very general. For example, work-group structure and organization are appropriate to the task to be performed, the personalities, skills and values of the employees, the physical environment and the tools, which no ‘how-to-do-it’ conclusions emerge.
Work-group structure is a configuration of great complexity even though it is composed of a fairly small number of fairly simple elements. It resembles a kaleidoscope. Fairly small shifts drastically change the pattern. And the number of combinations and permutations is so large as to approach infinity. In such a situation the only way to arrive at the right, the optimal solution is trial. The outsider, e.g., the industrial engineer, can help. But he cannot analytically arrive at the answer. The group itself, however, usually arrives at a right answer fairly fast and without much trouble. It works things out.