Role
The role is the bundling of tasks, authority, and responsibility to describe job positions, activities, and people. This can be used to create generalized profiles that can be used for similar tasks. That lowers the efforts for the documentation and makes the roles comparable across borders. Employees are easier to be identified and applied according to their roles. Double work and unclear responsibilities can be revealed.
The role model consists of three aspects: task, authority, and responsibility.
- Task
Tasks are the activities of a role. These may be operational or leadership tasks that are used in core and support processes. Examples are storing parts, sending an invoice, making staff appraisals.
- Authority
Authority describes the rights of the role. On the one hand, the execution of tasks must be authorized - to do something, to make an application, to decide something. On the other hand, the leading authority needs the power to give directions, lead employees, decide guidelines, and control the field. The format of the authorization may be more or less formal.
- Responsibility
Responsibility describes the liability to account for actions, results, and consequences that come from the task. Individual responsibility is determined by one’s activity or the doing of the directly assigned employees. Joint responsibility is a consequence of the position and the associated power. It arises if the decisions of other departments are shared or, at least, could be affected.
It is good practice to define roles so that task, authority, and responsibility are on the one hand. It won’t be easy to take responsibility if a task is not equipped with the required authority. The project leaders cannot take responsibility for their success if they do not control the budget.