The feeling of no longer knowing when you have completed your tasks and met the expectations of management, colleagues and not least yourself is widespread in public organisations.
"There was a time when the duties of employees were clarified in a job description, and they knew when their tasks had been completed. Today, many of them are responsible of defining their own role and responsibilities, which makes it hard to know where it all starts and ends."
These are the words of Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen, Professor at the Department of Business, Humanities and Law at CBS, who teaches on the Master of Public Governance (MPG). Åkerstrøm does research in the dynamics between employees and their leaders and has analysed how public organisations have gone from expecting employees to do their duty to assume hyper-responsibility.
”There was a time when the duties of employees were clarified in a job description, and they knew when their tasks had been completed. Today, many of them are responsible of defining their own role and responsibilities, which makes it hard to know where it all starts and ends,” says Niels Åkerstrøm.
According to the CBS researcher, public organisations have become so complex that leaders are no longer able to grasp the needs of the organisation and for this reason place the responsibility on the shoulders of the employees.
In such a working culture, self-leadership and commitment become essential virtues, however, many employees become hyper-responsible. This development comes at a price, the researcher points out:
”Many people go home every day with a feeling of having failed, some with a feeling of having failed a lot. It is a painful situation to be in, especially because it is not always easy to understand where the feelings come from, so people become introspective and hide them.”