Lead Essay
The End of Role Clarity
The idea of role clarity has come up in about 80% of the conversations I've had with teams and leaders. (By the way, all of the questions here follow Betteridge's Law of Headlines: if there's a question, the answer is no.)
- It comes up when there are disputes about propriety of a given action. Should so-and-so have done what they did?
- When there are questions about whether individuals can do their best work. Does so-and-so have a good idea of what's expected of them?
- When there are worries about people's ability to grow. Do managers know what it takes to become a leader?
- When execs wonder if they're hiring right. Are we confident this JD is what we actually need?
Role clarity, or the lack of it, gets blamed in every case.
The classic organizational psychology research (Robert Kahn and colleagues in 1964, John Rizzo and colleagues in 1970) treats role ambiguity as almost uniformly destructive: it lowers satisfaction; it reduces motivation; it drives emotional exhaustion. A Rutgers meta-analysis confirmed a moderate negative relationship between role ambiguity and job performance. This is the received wisdom, and I think it's increasingly wrong.
Eleven years ago I wrote about my dim view
