Clarification of responsibility is directed to the person able to affect the outcome

spheres of delegated responsibilities

It would seen that this failure is quite common in British industry as a poll of works managers place 'frustration at all management levels, due to lack of clearly defined spheres of delegated responsibilities, fomth in a list of factors limiting productivity. This is also confmned by Management Consultants Blake and Mouton who suggest that many managers have the attitude to their new subordinates of 'throwing him into the thick of things'. One manager in the present study used almost the same words: 'I was just flung into the deep end. Mind you it is the quickest way to leam-ink or swim.

It is also important to ensme that any clarification of responsibility is directed to the person able to affect the outcome, for as another manager complained:

We have full responsibility to draw up the route cards for each lorry so the drivers don't check them at the start of their shift. If there's been a mistake, they'll come back at the end of the day, still half loaded, without a care in the world, and hand us back our mistakes. It is too late for us to do anything then.

More objective work was carried out by Michigan University's Dent and Mann when they studied the accounting section of an electric power company. In this study individual and group performance was found to be related to the individual's knowledge of his responsibilities. Similarly, industrial psychologists Rodgers and Harrison with fourteen superior-subordinate pairs in a laboratory study, and with fifty-nine similar pairs at overhaul shops in a naval air station respectively, found that subordinates who more accurately predicted what their superiors expected of them tended to be given high I ranking on job performance.

On the other hand, a similar study of fifty-one foreman-manager pairs found no such correlation, while yet another team of researchers from Michigan University found no improvements in agreement on the subordinate's 'job through the use of written job descriptions. They conclude: 'Job descriptions may be adequate for long term relatively permanent matters, but they are less than adequate for dealing with situations which are constantly changing. '

Many of these apparently conflicting findings may stem from the grouping of all types of communication together. Work in 1964 by Kahn and his associates have made the first step in separating work oriented communication from welfare oriented communication. In their study they found 38 per cent of their subjects received inadequate information on advancement training prospects. The more recent studies by Herzberg, Paul, Lawler and Porter, and Friedlander and Walton, are beginning to put these findings in a conceptual context by a similar separation of motivation nto positive and negative, making essential reading for any manager interested in motivating his work force.