Management Bug: Overlapping Responsibilities

A MngtBug is a problem, cause or impact in a human manager’s decision which produces an incorrect or unexpected result. Every other week we share a little bit of our knowledge base on social media and our newsletter.

This week’s MngtBug is…

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Description

This week’s “Overlapping Responsibilities” is a very common problem independently of the size of the team and/or company.

By definition, overlapping responsibilities refers to a situation in which more than one individual is responsible for the same activity.
Only one person should be responsible for completing one activity. When 2 or more employees are unclear about who should do a job because of overlapping responsibility, it usually leads to conflict and poor working relationships. Often the Job does not get done because each employee assumes the other will do it. (Extracted and adapted from https://managementinnovations.wordpress.com/tag/overlapping-responsibility/)

Unclear roles and responsibilities can be stressful because:

• Your team members don’t understand how they fit into the team, resulting in difficulty in finding “task…