Assigning tasks in a company is a management practice that is so common and routine, we rarely question our ways of doing it. It generally doesn’t pose a problem, since employees are hired based on their skills, and their work revolves around these. It gets tricky, however, when employees are assigned tasks that fall outside their expertise or tasks that seem… pointless.
These tasks are called “illegitimate tasks,” because they deviate from the employee’s expected role or area of expertise. They directly affect the employee’s well-being, putting them in an uncomfortable professional situation. Pindek and colleagues (2018) became interested in the relationship between employees’ well-being and managers’ involvement in assigning illegitimate tasks, in a study conducted with engineers in Florida. They found, in particular, that assigning illegitimate tasks leads to dissatisfaction, especially when it was perceived as the result of a poor management decision. What is more, some people showing a hostile attribution bias would be more likely to experience negative emotions towards this kind of task. So how can you identify illegitimate tasks and avoid assigning them?
Authors:
- MARIE-ÈVE MAJOR, associate professor of ergonomics, Faculty of Human Kinetics, Université de Sherbrooke
ÉTIENNE FOUQUET, research assistant, Université de Sherbrooke
MARIE-ÉLISE LABRECQUE, research assistant, Université de Sherbrooke
This initiative was made possible through a collaboration with the Université de Sherbrooke.
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY:
Well-being
In this study, well-being is defined as the perceptions of an employee’s positive emotions. In this way, when a person feels frustrated, angry or stressed, they sense a decrease in their personal well-being.
Illegitimate tasks
Illegitimate tasks are tasks that are perceived as going against of what is normally expected of an employee in their work. They are divided into two categories: unreasonable tasks and pointless tasks.
Unreasonable tasks are those that require a level of experience and expertise that is mainly superior or inferior to that of the employee to whom the task has been assigned. They also include tasks overseen by unnecessarily restrictive rules.
In this situation, the employee can be assigned a task for which they were not hired or trained. It would be unreasonable, for example, to ask a consultant to do reception tasks. In the same way, tasks can be considered unreasonable when they are assigned to an employee when they are the responsibility of another employee, who is better able to do them: for example, asking a customer service representative to do financial analysis or produce recommendations. Finally, tasks governed by rules that are overly or unnecessarily restrictive can be considered unreasonable. Think, for example, of a receptionist who is asked to wait for clients to arrive without thinking of giving them tasks that can be done at the same time.
Pointless tasks are ineffective tasks or practices that stem, for example, from the whims of managers or the organization. These are tasks that must be done in a certain way for no particular reason.
Also considered pointless are tasks that should never be done or that could have been avoided. Think about forms that need to be filled in but will never be looked at! Task can also be considered pointless because the task itself is pointless or serves no purpose (for example, putting magazines in a waiting room in alphabetical order every morning).
That being said, some tasks can be both unreasonable and pointless to various degrees.
Hostile attribution bias (HAB)
This is the tendency some people have to see others as being responsible for unwelcome events that they are facing. People who have a higher level of HAB are more likely to see a task as illegitimate based on at times minor incidents or on slightly questionable aspects of the task. These people are also more likely to believe that their being assigned a task results from a deliberate negative intention.
WHAT YOU NEED TO REMEMBER
Employees are likely to associate illegitimate tasks with bad management practices, AND unreasonable tasks lead to more negative emotions than pointless tasks, especially among people demonstrating a higher level of HAB.
A double method
- This study was done with 420 employed engineers in Florida, in the United States.
- In total, the sample included 78.7% men and 21.3% women.
- The average age was 52 years, the average number of years of employment was 12, and the average number of hours worked per week was 45.6.
- a qualitative portion, to better understand employees’ perception regarding illegitimate tasks and their effects. Participants had to answer four open-ended questions intended to gather specific examples of situations where tasks that had been assigned to them were perceived as illegitimate.The study’s originality rests, among other things, on its methodology. The authors chose a double method, namely:
- a quantitative portion, to distinguish between types of illegitimate tasks and identify their mechanisms. Participants had to evaluate, using measurement scales, the processes leading to perceiving an assigned task as illegitimate, considering in a negative way the source of this assignment, and experiencing a negative emotional reaction towards this task.
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