The Push and Pull of Autonomy

Abstract

Organizations characterized by knowledge work will experience pressures from a variety of sources to provide increasing levels of autonomy to employees. Furthermore, as the nature of work has changed, the manifestations of employee autonomy have become more complex and varied. Although a great deal of literature exists on the effects of various types and facets of autonomy, these literatures focus almost exclusively on individual-level effects. On the organizational side however, we suggest that the increasing trend toward various forms of employee autonomy presents a tension for organizations as they struggle to reconcile this relinquishing of control with organizational leaders’ inherent desire for more control. We explore how managers and supervisors of knowledge work manage the inherent conflict between employee demands for autonomy and organizational needs for control, especially as it relates to the management of complexity and fairness issues. Furthermore, we discuss how this tension has important implications for research and practice.

Keywords

autonomy control bureaucracy

Work has changed over the past 40 years. Technological innovation has introduced entirely new industries and types of work, and the global shift from manufacturing economies to knowledge and service economies is having an enormous impact on the nature and context of work (Chen & McDonald, 2015; Grant & Parker, 2009). Many of the underlying assumptions about the design of work that were true in the 1970s and 1980s are no longer valid today, and organizations have been forced to adapt to a rapidly changing knowledge economy (Berg, Dutton, & Wrzesniewski, 2013). Knowledge work is inherently more ambiguous and uncertain (Alvesson, 2001) and more difficult to manage (Blackler, 1995), creating a challenge for many organizations. One result has been a gradual shift in control that has occurred from organizations to employees, as organizations have granted more discretion and autonomy (Langfred & Moye, 2004). We argue that this trend toward more ambiguous and uncertain work has created considerable tension and stress for organizations managing knowledge workers, largely as a result of their bureaucratic nature and need for control.

In addition to changes in work itself, organizations have been faced with changes in the attitudes and expectations of knowledge workers. Researchers have noted that employees’ expectations of what the organization should be providing them—in terms of job design—have increased, in the sense that managers are expected to take into account not only employees’ capabilities but also their values, motives, and preferences (Rousseau, Ho, & Greenberg, 2006). Expectations of Generation X and Y workers can be very different from those of past generations (Twenge, 2006), and organizations can struggle to design jobs to meet those expectations. The importance of employee empowerment (Mills & Ungson, 2003; Spreitzer, 1995, 1996), autonomy and self-management (Haas, 2010; Langfred, 2004), and job crafting (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001) has been increasingly emphasized since the early 1990s, as organizations have granted more control, discretion, and decision-making authority to employees. As organizations cede more control to employees, there is often a reciprocal expectation that employees will be more proactive (Grant & Ashford, 2008). One critical component of that increased proactivity, especially in industries such as knowledge work where jobs are already ambiguous, is proactivity in demanding more autonomy or at least actively negotiating it with their employer (Hornung, Rousseau, Glaser, Angerer, & Weigl, 2010).

Changes in technology have been profound during this period, with advances in communications and information technology affecting how, where, and when employees are able to work. The traditional assumptions of work as something that takes places in a specific location, at a particular time, with unambiguous and clear methods and under the direct supervision of a manager, no longer hold true for many workers. For example, communication technology now makes it possible for many employees to work at home or at dispersed locations, as opposed to a central, shared, facility (Bloom, Garicano, Sadun, & Van Reenen, 2014).

Autonomy has received considerable attention both in the research literature and in popular managerial and practitioner literatures. However, it is surprising that the vast majority of the research focus has been on the individual side, from the perspective of (and in terms of the effects on) the individual worker. Dependent variables have traditionally been in terms of individual satisfaction, motivation, productivity, and other measures directly related to the employee. Little attention has been given to how these changes in work, and resultant attitudes and assumptions about work, have affected organizations and managers within them.

Our purpose is to “flip” that perspective, and consider the tension and stress that is occurring on the organizational side as a result of these changes. The underlying research question we are interested in is as follows:

Research Question 1: How do managers and supervisors in knowledge work organizations manage the inherent conflict between employee demands for autonomy and organizational needs for control?

We will use theoretical perspectives on bureaucracy, borrowed from sociology, to examine how organizations are trying to grapple with these complex issues of control and autonomy. This tension is reflected in the attempt of organizations to balance the external pressures from the environment and employees to give up control, against their own internal and inherent bureaucratic desire for more control.

Our contributions in this article are as follows: We hope first and foremost to provide much-needed extensions to the literature on employee autonomy by examining the serious effects on organizations of such interventions, and the challenges and problems that ceding control to employees can present for management. In doing so, we also contribute specifically to the autonomy literature by providing a long-overdue clarification of many of the different ways in which autonomy can be manifested in today’s workplace, specifically in organizations characterized by knowledge work. Instead of the traditional individual-level focus, we introduce a more holistic perspective of exploring autonomy in terms of both the individual-level causes and effects, as well as in terms of the cross-level relationship between the individual and the organization, and organization-level effects (primarily on managers and supervisors). Finally, as a result of this perspective on employee versus organizational control, we suggest a number of new possible research questions and directions.

The Nature of Organizations and the Need for Control

Organizations, by their very nature, are intended to provide some level of control and coordination. In fact, the very word “organization” implies a certain degree of structure. If an activity had no need for centralized control or coordination, there would be no need for an organization (Scott, 1981/2003; Weber, 1921/1968). In the more “traditional” (i.e., manufacturing) work of the past, the need for centralized control and top-down management was not only accepted but also considered necessary. In Adam Smith’s hypothetical pin factory, for example, the need to organize and coordinate the individual work is clearly illustrated, as the different specialized roles (metal cutter, pin drawer, roller, finisher, etc.) all had to work together to increase productivity (Smith, 1776). As a result of changes in the nature and context of work (Grant & Parker, 2009), however, this fundamental assumption about work has become less accepted. The many forms of autonomy that can be found in a variety of today’s workplaces are examples of how perceptions toward work have changed and reflect a gradual shift of control from the organization to the employee. We argue that this ceding of control—combined with increased uncertainty and ambiguity in many industries and markets—necessarily causes tension and stress for managers in organizations, as the inherent purpose of an organization remains to provide control and stability. This shift can be much more pronounced in some organizations than others, depending on the industry, work, location, and culture. Organizations that engage in sophisticated knowledge work in modern industrialized nations with advanced communications infrastructures and a highly educated workforce, for example, are far more likely to feel strong pressures to grant autonomy, as compared with organizations engaged in relatively routine manufacturing or service tasks.

The traditional assumption regarding the need for control in organizations was especially true in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In this era, pervasive industrialization and manufacturing grew, and organizations were faced with a workforce comprised primarily of unskilled laborers. Frederick Taylor recognized this problem, and through his work on scientific management set out to discover how organizations and laborers could be more efficient and productive (Taylor, 1911). His ideas were based on the assumption that the balance of control between managers and employees is a zero-sum game (cf. Fayol, 1949). By retaining control and instructing workers on the one “best way” to carry out a process, the problems of inefficiency would be solved. In this way, he advocated for the controlling of employee behaviors down to the specific movements required to perform each task. Behavior control mechanisms used to test Taylor’s ideas included explicit work assignments, specification of rules and procedures, and detailed timelines for projects (see Henderson & Lee, 1992; Kirsch, 1997; Pinto, Pinto, & Prescott, 1993).

Over the last 40 years, however, as the American workforce has transitioned to more skilled work, the argument against Taylorism has grown stronger, centering on the notion that by controlling workers, the organization in fact reduces worker skill, decreases trust (Piccoli & Ives, 2003), and leads to a variety of other problems that can reduce, rather than improve, performance (Karasek & Theorell, 1990; Parker, 1998). As Mohrman and Cohen (1995) observed, workers with a fixed job description became less and less common, and flexibility was increasingly valued. Over time, those studying jobs called for greater employee autonomy (Aktouf, 1992; Strauss & Rosenstein, 1970). This rise against Taylorism was driven by the belief that performance will be stronger when employees care more about, and are more involved in, their jobs. Research streams that have adopted these arguments include the Job Characteristics Model (Hackman & Oldham, 1980), psychological empowerment (Spreitzer, 1995), job crafting (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001), goal-setting theory (Erez, Earley, & Hulin, 1985), intrinsic motivation (Deci & Ryan, 1985), self-managed teams (e.g., Yeatts & Hyten, 1998), and much of the literature on self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997).

Just as there is pressure on many organizations to grant or support autonomy, there is pressure to retain and exert control throughout the organization. Weber (1921/1968) explained that bureaucracy is a powerful and efficient means of controlling people, and it is almost an axiomatic assumption that all organizations require a certain level of control to coordinate the actions of the members (Scott, 1981/2003). Weber articulates the arguments for why the need for coordination and control eventually results in the bureaucratic structure, which can take on an “irreversible” momentum, leaving the organization with an inherent drive to control. According to March and Simon (1958), one of the defining characteristics of organizations is the high specificity of structure and coordination, and the fact that there is a central coordinative system—both of which require control over members to implement.

Despite the many different organizational forms in today’s world, DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983) observation of relative homogeneity still rings true. While technology has allowed for global collaboration and other such innovations, the basic organizational chart is still inherently bureaucratic and hierarchical in nature for the vast majority of organizations. As a result, we argue that even when organizations may appear to want to grant autonomy there will nonetheless be a countervailing pressure within the organization to retain as much control over the individual employee as possible. Juillerat (2010) noted that even in the modern workplace, in which organizations strive to be flexible and are faced with the pressures to cede control, formalization appears to be “increasingly pervasive” in modern organizations. In terms of the effects on individuals, one oft-criticized aspect of organizations is the extent to which they lead to the rationalization and depersonalization of our lives, imposing planning, efficiency, and order (Goodman, 1968), with individuals often described as being “trapped within organizational cages” (Scott, 1981/2003, p. 5).

The level of formalization of tasks (Adler & Borys, 1996; Hage & Aiken, 1967, 1969; Juillerat, 2010), which is typically manifested by the standardization of work, is an important feature of all organizations. Formalization is essentially an organizational device that prescribes how, when, and by whom a task is performed (Hall, 1977), and often results from bureaucratized or hierarchical structures (Mintzberg, 1979; Scott, 1981/2003). While there can be many benefits to the standardization and formalization of task for organizations, it almost by definition conflicts with individual discretion or autonomy (Langfred & Moye, 2004). Typically, the more a task is formalized, the less discretion is possible (Bailyn, 1985; Raelin, 1985)—which is a clear illustration of the tension between bureaucratic pressures and the granting of autonomy. Adler and Borys (1996) noted the potential for the “coercive function” (p. 62) of bureaucracy that inhibits individual autonomy, and Lawler (1994) noted the tensions between attempts to involve employees and formalization and bureaucracy. However, Adler and Borys also noted that under some circumstances, some forms of formalization can actually make it easier for employees to make decisions by providing structure for them to do so. Thus, while the general conflict between formalization/standardization and individual discretion and freedom clearly exists, there are also more complex relationships to explore in this area, which further emphasizes the complexity that managers have to deal with when considering how to manage the tension between employee desires for autonomy and organizational desires for control, as it may not always be a zero-sum game, but rather a complex interaction.

Another source of tension between individual autonomy and organizational need for control can be the example of the manager experiencing an organizational threat, which involves a “negative situation in which loss is likely and over which one has relatively little control” (Dutton & Jackson, 1987, p. 80). In line with the threat-rigidity hypothesis, some researchers (Chattopadhyay, Glick, & Huber, 2001; Ocasio, 1995) argue that managers in times of threat will respond to domains over which they have more control to engage in risk-mitigating activities (Sitkin & Pablo, 1992), to avoid unexpected surprises or unanticipated problems (Osman, 2010). Evidence suggests that such threats also lead to managerial stress as they seek to retain control (Muurlink, Wilkinson, Peetz, & Townsend, 2012). A logical extension of these findings is that managers’ stress will increase, lowering their tolerance for uncertainty, which will trickle down to employees and their experience of autonomy.

We therefore argue that this underlying tension between organizational control and individual autonomy is inevitable. Although some of the forces discussed above may “push” the organization in the direction of granting more autonomy, there will always be an inertial force that provides a “pull” in the opposite direction, as the organization resists giving up control. This is thus an inherent tension. On one hand, organizations increasingly feel pressure to provide more autonomy and relinquish more control in the workplace, yet inherently have a “built-in” desire to retain control. Today, organizations—particularly those organized around knowledge work or highly skilled and specialized work—need to be competitive on the labor market to attract qualified employees. By the same token, they need to be able to retain employees, a challenge which has become more difficult in recent decades as it has become more commonplace and socially acceptable for individuals to switch jobs many times during a career (Twenge, 2006). As such, organizations need to be able to provide job characteristics such as autonomy that are desirable in the labor market (Langfred & Moye, 2004).

As autonomy has been linked to positive individual outcomes such as employee well-being (Wu, Griffin, & Parker, 2015), motivation, satisfaction and engagement (Argote & McGrath, 1993; Dwyer, Schwartz, & Fox, 1992; Vera, Martínez, Lorente, & Chambel, 2016), and lower turnover (Annink & den Dulk, 2012), it stands to reason that organizations want to be able to give autonomy to their workers, as having a workforce with such characteristics will help the organization remain competitive. This could include giving individuals control over the things that they are doing, whether it is choosing tasks or goals, how to work on a task, when to work on a task, or where to work on a task. Similarly, the clearest pathway to autonomy “success” would be for the organizational structure, technology, and management to support such autonomy, so that individuals can be successful. However, these are substantial assumptions, and the theories surrounding what happens when organizations grant autonomy have ignored the fact that hierarchical organizations are not inherently designed to handle the uncertainty involved in relinquishing control.

Tension in Action: Telework in the Federal Government

An illustrative example of such potential tension between a perceived need to provide employee autonomy and the various organizational pressures against it is telework (also known as telecommuting) within the federal government—one type of work associated with increased autonomy (Gajendran & Harrison, 2007). In 2010, the Telework Enhancement Act was passed, giving governmental agencies the freedom with which to pursue more flexible telework policies, centered on allowing individuals to spend some or all of their time working outside of the organizational facility. The desired benefits are the same as those noted in job characteristics theory (Hackman & Oldham, 1976): employee motivation, satisfaction, commitment, and retention. However, in examining the telework guidelines for the various agencies, it is clear that the bureaucratic pressures counteracted some, if not all, of the benefits of granting this type of autonomy. The General Services Administration (GSA), for example, stated in its telework policy that “telework is work time (hours of duty) and is not to be used for any purposes other than official duties” (GSA, 2011). This policy statement is somewhat troubling, given that one of the main benefits of this type of autonomy is freedom to schedule work appropriately throughout the day. Even the GSA administrator who signed the telework agreement acknowledged the problem when she noted that telework “. . . is a team sport. It’s all about culture and trust, not a bunch of rules” (Clark, 2011).

The tension here is that the many added policies and complicated procedures which accompanied the granting of autonomy can have negative effects on employees. Individuals may end up with more task work when teleworking in the form of documentation and the need to demonstrate compliance with complex bureaucratic rules. Furthermore, employees might be worried when teleworking that the organization does not really support the practice, causing them to work more hours than they should (Hardy, 2011). In addition, when granted autonomy, individual employees may be scrutinized more by the organization, creating pressure to work harder than they might have without autonomy. This exemplifies the tension within the organization—while organizations ostensibly give autonomy on one hand, they try to retain control on the other.

This simple example demonstrates the tension that organizations can face when trying to manage autonomy within the workforce. As researchers have noted, much has changed in the nature and context of work, and job design is a far more complex and nuanced proposition than it was 40 years ago (Grant & Parker, 2009). The challenge for managers to navigate the many issues that are raised by various forms of individual autonomy is thus a crucial and understudied aspect of organizational management.

Managing the Tension

There are many ways in which the granting of individual autonomy to employees can affect managers and supervisors in an organization. In this article, we will focus on two particular sets of effects resulting from individual autonomy, namely (a) the challenge of managing increased complexity and unpredictability, and (b) the challenge of managing issues of fairness and equity. We have chosen these two categories out of the many possible because they address organizational performance and operations on one hand, and issues surrounding employee perceptions of fairness and justice on the other hand. In many ways, managing performance and managing relationships are the two primary tasks of management (Drucker, 1977); hence, this focus allows us to capture the essence of the managerial challenges without broadening the scope of this article to include all possible effects of individual autonomy on managers.

To explore some of the specific challenges faced by managers in terms of complexity and fairness, we first examine the various ways that autonomy can be implemented in today’s knowledge work organizations.

The Manifold Forms of Autonomy

To understand the tension that can be experienced by managers at the organizational level, we take a look at the landscape of autonomy in today’s knowledge work organizations. This includes the types of autonomy that organizations might provide to workers, in addition to the bottom-up forces pushing the organization toward empowering more individuals to control various aspects of their jobs. When originally conceptualized as a single and relatively narrow job characteristic, autonomy described the discretion and freedom an employee had in carrying out assigned tasks at work (Hackman & Oldham, 1976). At the time, these assigned tasks typically took place at a prescribed time in a fixed location, and any communication was likely to be face to face and immediate. Given the current forms of work and today’s technology however, these underlying assumptions about work and autonomy no longer hold true (Grant & Parker, 2009). Individual autonomy is still defined the same, but the scope of what the worker may have discretion and freedom over has expanded in many different ways.

To explore how work and autonomy have changed over time, and to understand the challenges faced by managers in organizations, we will outline some of these changes and explore what individual autonomy is today. We have organized this into three sections: task-based autonomy, job crafting, and alternative work arrangements. This brief review is not intended as a typology or conceptual categorization, but rather a convenient way to organize an overview of the various forms that individual autonomy can take, and how this has changed over the decades.

Task-Based Autonomy

In contrast to the “traditional” job autonomy proposed in the Job Characteristics Model (Hackman, 1980; Hackman & Oldham, 1976), autonomy can be far more extensive in today’s work, including the methods, scheduling, and decision making involved in the task itself (Breaugh, 1985; Locke, Alavi, & Wagner, 1998). With the increasing shift toward knowledge work and service work in many organizations (Reinhardt, Schmidt, Sloep, & Drachsler, 2011), the amount of task autonomy granted to workers today is seemingly growing.

Knowledge work often adds a complication for which many traditional job design models are not well suited, namely irreducible task uncertainty, which comes from two primary sources. The first is the far looser coupling between process and outcomes in knowledge work (Woolley, 2009). On a manufacturing assembly line for example, 4 more hours work will reliably produce more units, and the productivity can typically be very precisely predicted. In knowledge work, such as developing code for a software project however, 4 more hours of work may or may not improve the product (and could conceivably even make it worse). The second source of uncertainty is multiple tasks and nested goals. The relationship of the assembly line worker’s effort to the broader organizational effort is in essence designed into the job, and is typically a single task (or a sequence of single tasks), and is very clear and evident to the worker. For the software developer, however, writing code for a project may have multiple aspects to it, and working on a particular section of code may just be one of many simultaneous tasks that constitute the software designer’s job (e.g., other pieces of the current project, coordinating with coworkers who are working on the same project, working on other projects, planning with other employees on future projects, testing previous work, etc.). As a result of such uncertainty, the autonomy necessary for the knowledge worker typically requires a lot more discretion than that required for more traditional and predictable work in which autonomy may be granted over the specific component of an otherwise fixed process.

Another aspect of knowledge work is potential equifinality. In work such as software development, services, research, academia, design, and architecture (to name but a few examples), there are potentially many different paths to the ultimate outcome, whether that be a computer application, a new material, client contract renewal, a published paper, or an office building design. In more traditional factory work, a task typically has to be sequenced in a particular way and is characterized by high interdependence (Kiggundu, 1983). For example, when assembling an automotive engine, there is a specific way that it has to be done, and any variation from defined processes will result in failure. In many types of knowledge work, however, there is not necessarily a set method or specific sequence required for the work, necessitating far more discretion and control over how to carry out the work. Furthermore, for knowledge work tasks that involve creativity, this is especially true, as it is hard to define a process to get an employee to be creative. So although task autonomy may be based on the same principle of allowing greater control over implementation, the changing nature of work has meant that the actual manifestation of task autonomy in knowledge work means that the individual worker often has to be granted control over a far greater scope of their work.

Finally, task-based autonomy has increased due to the reliance on the use of teams in organizations. Since the 1970s, organizations have increasingly relied on teams to organize work (Hackman & Wageman, 2005; Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, & Jundt, 2005; Kozlowski & Bell, 2003). As the use of teams has grown, so has the adoption of various autonomy-based designs, such as autonomous work teams, self-managing teams, and self-designing teams (Haas, 2010; Langfred, 2007). Individual workers assigned to such teams often have to manage and juggle complex work arrangements, as their role in such teams can vary considerably. As Langfred (2000) pointed out, the term “self-managing team” can actually describe a number of different designs, with very different implications for the experience of autonomy by the individual employee. Furthermore, as Barker (1993) illustrated, some self-managing teams can actually end up being very restrictive and even coercive in terms of the control they exert over individual workers. Thus, the organizational granting of autonomy to a team does not necessarily mean that individuals will experience it in the same way. In addition to the greater scope and experience of autonomy, and the pressure on the organization to respond more readily to employee demands and preferences for autonomy, the increasing reliance on team-based work creates many different possible permutations of work arrangements that involve different types of autonomy at different levels.

Job Crafting and Meaningful Work

The concept of job crafting is a relatively recent manifestation of individual autonomy, as well as an illustration of how the shift of control from organization to employee has accelerated in recent years (Berg et al., 2013; Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). Job crafting is a process by which employees are given discretion and freedom to redesign their jobs to create a better fit between themselves and their jobs (Tims, Bakker, & Derks, 2013). This results in the experience of work as more meaningful (Tims & Bakker, 2010; Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001) and can lead to greater satisfaction, performance, and retention (Kristof-Brown, Zimmerman, & Johnson, 2005).

Job redesign in general has been considered a way to improve productivity and performance for centuries. The Job Characteristics Model (Hackman & Oldham, 1976) discussed earlier is an example, and the tenets of scientific management and Taylorism are clearly rooted in the logic of redesigning jobs to increase efficiency and productivity. Adam Smith’s pin factory example is explicitly about the importance of designing jobs efficiently. What has changed in the past few decades, however, is the entire approach to job redesign. In the past, job redesign has typically been a “top-down” organizational intervention, directed by managers (Berg et al., 2013) and often in response to technological changes (Hackman, Pearce, & Wolfe, 1978). Job crafting, in contrast, is driven by the employee and is intended to be “bottom-up” as the individual employees make changes to the task itself, the interpersonal relationships involved in the task, and their cognitive perceptions of the task (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). The purpose is not only to allow employees to take advantage of unique knowledge they have of their jobs to be more efficient (Langfred & Moye, 2004) but also to create more meaningfulness in their jobs, leading to greater satisfaction and motivation. Another distinction is that job crafting by the individual is intended to be a continuous and ongoing process (Tims & Bakker, 2010), as opposed to a one-time redesign imposed by management.

An additional factor driving the increasing focus on job crafting is the aforementioned increasing demand for autonomy from prospective employees. To attract talent and remain competitive, organizations increasingly need to consider the preferences and values of their workforce (Rousseau et al., 2006; Twenge, 2006). Although the argument has been made that all individuals have an innate need for autonomy and self-determination (Ryan & Deci, 2000), Langfred and Moye (2004) argued that an individual’s preference for autonomy (Wageman, 1995) can be both trait- and state dependent, driven by inherent preferences (Orpen, 1985) as well as more situational factors (Dwyer et al., 1992; Strain, 1999), self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997), and experience (Langfred & Moye, 2004). Spreitzer’s (1995, 1996) work on empowerment is a reflection of this change, and is perhaps the beginning of the organizational conception of autonomy being a much more complex and subtle activity, requiring more consideration than merely thoughts of efficiency and productivity. A more recent focus on the “meaningfulness” of work has illustrated that when work is perceived as more meaningful, it not only results in greater job satisfaction, motivation, and reported person–job fit but also performance (Bunderson & Thompson, 2009; Rosso, Dekas, & Wrzesniewski, 2010; Tims, Derks, & Bakker, 2016).

It has also been noted that in addition to the “bottom-up” process of job crafting (and in contrast to “top-down” job redesign dictated by the organization), employees can sometimes negotiate idiosyncratic work arrangements with their employer (Hornung et al., 2010). This echoes earlier suggestions by Ilgen and Hollenbeck (1991) and by Wageman (1995) who noted how individuals can often adapt and adjust their jobs or roles outside the formal structure of job redesign. The increasing prevalence of job crafting is clearly a function of both the increasing attention of organizations on the preferences and values of employees, as well as the changing nature of work. In highly interdependent factory work, for example, there would not be much opportunity for significant job crafting on the part of employees on the line, even if supervisors and managers wanted to allow it. In organizations characterized by knowledge and service work, however, the potential for job crafting is much greater, so it has become an increasingly common way that greater autonomy is manifesting itself in such workplaces.

Alternative Work Arrangements

Another example of how autonomy can take on an expanded role in today’s work is the increasing adoption of alternative work arrangements, including telework, part-time work, flexible work, and the like. As with traditional autonomy, these involve the granting of increased freedom and discretion to the employee, whether it be control over where they work or when they work. As seen in the earlier telework example, both private- and public-sector organizations are responding to increased employee and labor market demands.

Over the past 10 years, the percentage of teleworkers has increased to 80%, with some estimates now putting the total number above 3 million in the United States alone (Global Workplace Analytics, 2016). The link between telework and autonomy is quite strong (Gajendran & Harrison, 2007). In addition to employees clamoring for telework to reduce work–family conflict (Hornung, et al., 2010) and increase job satisfaction (Dubrin, 1991), utilizing telework and other alternative work locations can help organizations save money on office space (Cascio, 2000), be more efficient with office relocations (Buono, 2003), and more easily employ talented individuals who may live in distant locations (Cramton & Hinds, 2004). The beneficial impact of teleworking is centered on perceived autonomy and freedom, as telework provides employees a choice over location of their work (Dubrin, 1991; Standen, Daniels, & Lamond, 1999). Telework also increases feelings of freedom and discretion as employees are psychologically removed from direct, face-to-face supervision (Dubrin, 1991).

Telework also typically provides flexibility in terms of how individuals schedule their work (Shamir & Salomon, 1985). This is echoed by Gajendran and Harrison (2007, p. 1526), who stated,

An implicit assumption in the telecommuting literature has been that flexibility in work location is likely to increase self-reliance in scheduling particular tasks and to increase control over the means of completing them: Flexibility equals control (Duxbury, Higgins, & Neufeld, 1998; Raghuram, Garud, Wiesenfeld, & Gupta, 2001).

This idea of scheduling flexibility has been defined as control over one’s work schedule or when to work (also referred to as timing control—Jackson, Wall, Martin, & Davids, 1993). Many have noted the importance of this type of autonomy for workers who have significant family demands (Baltes, Briggs, Huff, Wright, & Neuman, 1999; Golden, Veiga, & Simsek, 2006; Hill, Erickson, Holmes, & Ferris, 2010). Scheduling flexibility is substantially different from the traditional facet of job autonomy typically referred to as “scheduling autonomy” which involved only the scheduling of how to carry out a specific assigned task within the context of a normal workday and not the much broader scope of when to actually work (Breaugh, 1985).

Finally, organizations have granted more freedom and discretion to individuals not only by using self-managed teams but also by widely employing geographically dispersed, or “virtual,” teams (Gibson & Gibbs, 2006; Hinds & Kiesler, 2002). These teams involve collaborations that are not physically colocated, to capitalize on far-flung talent, or to reduce travel or moving costs. When organizations utilize such teams, they reduce the ability to control communication processes, norms, and behaviors, as to control would necessitate shared expectations and understandings across locations, a difficult task (Hinds & Bailey, 2003).

Summary

The breadth and depth of autonomy offered to employees have become quite wide and deep, and there are many different ways in which autonomy can manifest in modern organizations, especially in those primarily characterized by knowledge work. This “push” for more freedom and discretion on the part of employees has come about for a variety of reasons, including technological advancement, the movement to empower workers in professional jobs, and the desire to have fewer middle managers and more efficient organizational structures. The result, of course, is the tension we are interested in, and the challenges faced by managers and supervisors in such organizations. Organizations, and the managers within them, now have far more forms of autonomy to manage and must decide what type, how much, and to whom autonomy should be granted. The need to do this effectively is a complex and multi-faceted challenge, and is ultimately the question we are interested in: How managers and supervisors cope with this tension as they try to balance employee desires and increased performance potential against organizational needs and bureaucratic pressures.

The Challenge for Managers

Managing Complexity

Assuming that the organizational leadership has decided to grant autonomy, to assign task autonomy to individual workers—especially in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity that can exist in knowledge work—the manager must consider whether the individual employees have sufficient knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) to be able to take advantage of increased discretion and freedom in their work. Part of the difficulty for the manager involved in this is in accurately assessing and evaluating the KSAs of employees. The subjective desire of an employee and their perceived self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997) to have increased freedom and discretion (discussed in more detail below) may not necessarily be correlated with actual objective competence, and if there is a mismatch between the two, performance will likely suffer if autonomy is granted to employees who are not sufficiently able to utilize it (Hersey & Blanchard, 1993).

By a similar logic, if autonomy is granted to an employee who does not actually want autonomy, a similar mismatch can occur, undermining employee motivation and job satisfaction. As noted in Langfred and Moye (2004), individuals can have very different preferences for autonomy. The importance of person–job fit, as well as person–organization fit (Kristof-Brown et al., 2005), has become an increasingly important topic for the granting of autonomy and for organizational selection, and continues to receive ongoing research attention (e.g., Sekiguchi & Huber, 2011; Warr & Inceoglu, 2012). In addition to earlier work on preference for autonomy (Dwyer et al., 1992; Wageman, 1995) and need for autonomy (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Landeweerd & Boumans, 1994), research has continued to focus on these individual differences in employees (e.g., Liu, Zhang, Wang, & Lee, 2011; Van Yperen, Wörtler, & De Jonge, 2016). An additional potential dilemma for managers is the employee with a strong preference for autonomy, but without dispositional traits (such as tolerance for ambiguity) that would allow them to successfully take advantage of such autonomy. Decisions made by managers and supervisors about how much, and to whom, individual autonomy should be granted can thus have significant impact on their performance, and subsequent organizational performance.

To assign the correct amount and type of autonomy to the correct employee can be a very difficult and time-consuming task, given the need to accurately evaluate relevant KSAs as well as employee preferences and personality traits. Individual differences—both dispositional and in terms of KSAs—are likely to be crucial as well and should prove to be a critical but often-neglected piece of the autonomy story. If such individual differences are not taken into account, not only may expected outcomes not materialize, but it may even be possible to get outcomes that are contrary or opposite to the desired states (e.g., Hardy, 2011). Compared with traditional supervisory roles, the task of allocating autonomy clearly requires far more competence, perception, and a broader skill set on the part of the manager. As such, the level of stress and uncertainty for managers will likely be higher in organizations characterized by high levels of employee individual autonomy, suggesting the following propositions:

Proposition 1: Managing workers with individual autonomy is more difficult and stressful than managing workers without individual autonomy.

Proposition 2: The more diversity in KSAs and preferences among employees, the more difficult and stressful it is to manage them.

In addition to the above issues related to the question of what type of autonomy—and how much—to grant to particular employees, a separate issue surrounds managing the manifold forms of autonomy. Managing workers with substantial autonomy and different types of autonomy involves many unique challenges that are not encountered when managing workers in more traditional job designs.

One likely outcome is a reduction in the predictability of work output. Partially a result of knowledge work in itself, the addition of autonomy will likely make specific predictions in terms of outcomes, volume, quality, and timing of work less accurate and more difficult for managers. This will be a source of stress and dissatisfaction for many managers, especially as the bureaucratic nature of organizations demands reliability and predictability in operations, and managers will feel pressure to provide that.

Another issue relates to interdependence (Kiggundu, 1983). While not an issue in all forms of knowledge work, in some instances, the nature and task design of the work will require considerable coordination between individual workers. When management can control the design and flow of work, managing such interdependencies is simpler and easier to predict. When workers have more control over the design of their own jobs, this can create difficult coordination issues. Thus, although individual autonomy can make the experience of individual work more motivating and satisfying (Argote & McGrath, 1993), it can simultaneously be at odds with task interdependence in teams and organizations (Langfred, 2005) and make the coordination of such work more difficult and frustrating for managers and supervisors.

Proposition 3: The more variety of individual autonomy is granted to employees, the more difficult and stressful it is to manage them.

Managing Fairness

Another area of concern for managers to deal with is that of employee perceptions of fairness in the workplace. When individual autonomy is granted to workers, it can cause a variety of such issues, and the more types and amount of autonomy are present in the organization, the more serious these issues can become.

As discussed above, the more diversity in KSAs and preferences there is within the workforce, the more likely it is that managers will be granting individual autonomy that varies in both type and degree. Some employees will be granted greater autonomy and some less. This inevitably means that workers’ jobs that might in the past have been very similar can become quite dissimilar, including not only differences in the work itself but also where and when the work takes place. As coworkers are the most common source of equity comparisons (Adams, 1965; Greenberg, 1988), having considerable differences is more likely to cause perceptions of unfairness among employees as compared with standardized and very similar work and conditions.

Furthermore, research on positive illusions and the illusion of control has consistently demonstrated overconfidence in judgment and ability (Fischhoff, Slovic, & Lichtenstein, 1977; West & Stanovich, 1997). This suggests that some individuals will inevitably overestimate their ability to actually take advantage of the autonomy they are granted. This is an instance where too much self-efficacy (or self-confidence) can be problematic, because employees may believe that they can “handle” increased autonomy, but perhaps do not actually have sufficient skills in terms of scheduling, prioritizing, or even self-discipline. If the manager is able to more objectively evaluate their KSAs, and decides not to grant the type or degree of autonomy that the worker believes he or she should have, this can lead to dissatisfaction and frustration on the part of the employee. For example, if employees really want to be able to work remotely and believe that they should be allowed to, then it will likely lead to dissatisfaction if they are not only told they may not have that autonomy but they also see other employees being granted it. In addition to equity comparisons with other employees, it has been found that workers will perceive inequity if their compensation or job conditions do not match their own perception of what they deserve (Dyer & Theriault, 1976). The above arguments suggest the following proposition:

Proposition 4: The more diversity in KSAs and preferences among employees, the more potential there is for fairness concerns when autonomy is granted.

Allowing individual workers the discretion and freedom to be involved in crafting or designing their own jobs can create an additional variety of issues and problems for managers. In addition to needing to manage the potential issues of fairness caused by potentially very different jobs and working conditions for similar employees mentioned above, there are several other challenges faced by managers.

For the organization, job crafting can create a number of potential organizational issues that managers and supervisors may have to address. One such issue is human resource (HR) related, in that when individual workers are allowed to design their own jobs, potential problems related to compensation and organizational policies may occur. If different employees are working in jobs that have different requirements, standards, hours, and schedules, for example, compensating them according to the same organizational standard could be problematic, both from an objective legal perspective and from the more subjective employee perspective of fairness. As the direct organizational representative, it falls upon the manager or supervisor to both implement and justify such HR systems.

Furthermore, when individuals have more freedom to craft their own jobs, managers need to be alert to issues of changing perceptions of the psychological contract. In a more traditional bureaucratic organization, characterized by higher levels of formalization and standardization, the psychological contract perceived by the individual worker is going to be relatively constant and somewhat predictable. In the situation of substantial autonomy for job crafting however, the psychological contract may become much more fluid and subjective, which is something that managers have to be aware of, as they are seen as the organization’s representative. Although some researchers are starting to ask these questions (Demerouti, 2014), there is currently no research that explicitly focuses on the potential changes to psychological contracts under conditions of job crafting. The above logic suggests that increased variety of autonomy—such as job crafting and alternative work arrangements—is likely to exacerbate fairness concerns among employees.

Proposition 5: The more forms of autonomy granted to employees, the more fairness concerns will be present in the workforce.

In this section, we have highlighted some of the possible ways in which the need to manage complexity and issues of fairness and justice can be a challenge for managers in organizations that grant autonomy to employees. It is worth noting that many of the arguments and phenomena that may cause fairness concerns are also additional examples of complexity and difficulty in managing workers. In that sense, the arguments for Propositions 4 and 5 also reinforce Propositions 1, 2, and 3. This article has provided examples of some of the organizational costs to managers that can occur as a result of individual autonomy. There are many other ways in which managers may struggle with various problems and challenges resulting from the need to grant individual autonomy, and although we have highlighted those specifically related to the management of complexity and fairness concerns, there are many others that could, and should, be explored in the future.

Discussion

The tension between the pressures to grant autonomy to workers versus the pressure to retain control within an organization is complicated, and can be disruptive in a variety of ways. The effects on organizations of granting autonomy to employees, and the possible conflict this can create with bureaucratic pressures from within the organizations, can take many forms. These can include the stress on managers of being tasked with implementing autonomy that they do not really want to grant. Effects can include the stress of trying to implement autonomy without the appropriate organizational systems (technological, informational, or managerial) in place to support such autonomy. Effects can also include the stress of needing to have a much more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the individual needs and preferences of different employees. These effects—and the many possible moderators—have not been extensively studied, and we suggest that there are many opportunities for novel and interesting research in exploring them. This is not only valuable for developing a better conceptual understanding for research but also for managerial practice, as executives and managers continue to struggle with the challenge of how to manage this constant source of tension and conflict within their organizations.

There are many specific research questions that can be explored, given the multitude of different implementations of autonomy, combined with the different types of systems in organizations. For instance, a particular organization in a service industry, with strong communications technology and information systems and tech-savvy employees, may be able to successfully grant considerable autonomy to employees in terms of where and when to work (alternative work arrangements) and may allow some job crafting, but might not be able to grant too much task autonomy because of the particular nature of a task—such as tight task interdependencies. Another organization might be able to grant considerable task autonomy but may be physically or technologically restricted from allowing employees much autonomy in terms of where and when they work. Exploring the alignment between these issues, and the effects on managers and supervisors of misalignment, raises a host of interesting research questions.

We do not have the space in this article to delineate all the different possible ways that the conflict between an inherent organizational or bureaucratic desire for increased control and the need to relinquish more control to employees in the workplace can create stress and tension for managers. However, we believe that we have illustrated the importance of considering this topic, which will only become more important as organizations continue to struggle with this dilemma and as knowledge work becomes more widespread in the future. We have provided some specific propositions as well as outlined a number of unexplored directions and questions for researchers to focus on. As we focus on the organizational and managerial “side” of the autonomy equation, we believe that further investigation—both empirical and conceptual—will provide valuable insights for research and practice.

Conclusion

In this article, we have noted that the nature of work has changed in a variety of ways. We have argued that one effect of this has been to make autonomy a far more complex, varied, and nuanced job characteristic than it used to be when first conceptualized in formal job design models in the 1970s. We also observed how much more prevalent and popular autonomy has become in knowledge work and how organizations can feel considerable pressure from multiple sources to grant autonomy to employees. At the same time however, we acknowledge that the fundamental nature of organizations themselves has not changed, and there is an inherent pressure within organizations to retain control. The resultant tension between the pressure to grant autonomy (the “push”) and the pressure to retain control (the “pull”) has been relatively unexplored empirically and undeveloped conceptually. As such, we have described this tension and suggested ways in which it can lead to novel and interesting research questions. As a secondary contribution, we have sought to clarify the increased variety and complexity of autonomy as it can manifest in today’s knowledge work organizations.

A central feature of our approach to autonomy in organizations is to examine the relevant questions and outcomes from the perspective of the organizations and the managers within, in contrast to the more traditional view of focusing on effects on individual employees. Taking account of this more “top-down” approach to employee autonomy provides a new analytical lens, and allows us to explore unexpected and possibly harmful and stressful effects on managers within organizations. This provides an interesting contrast to the traditional expectation of beneficial and positive effects of individual autonomy on workers. We believe that ultimately this will not only result in new and illuminating research questions but will also allow for a more multi-level and holistic perspective of exploring autonomy in terms of both the individual-level causes and effects, as well as in terms of the cross-level relationships between the individual and the organization, and organization-level effects.

The primary research questions suggested by our approach involve dependent measures related to stress and difficulty experienced by managers and supervisors, as they struggle with challenges of increased complexity and employee perceptions of fairness. Broader research questions could involve the tension experienced by managers resulting from differences in motives, values, or managerial philosophies within the organization, or could result from a lack of alignment or “fit” between the intention of granting autonomy to employees and the ability, resources, or organizational systems necessary to successfully implement such autonomy.

As a secondary source of research questions, we outline a wide variety of ways in which individual autonomy can manifest itself, whether in terms of how work is accomplished, or when it is scheduled, or where it is carried out, and many other variants and applications of autonomy. When this wide variety of autonomy possibilities is combined with the various sources of tension and conflict that managers can experience, an almost infinite number of permutations of autonomy types and organizational/managerial tension and conflict are realized. As a result, there are a virtually endless number of possibilities for specific research hypotheses that could be explored, once we adopt the dual perspectives of both an expanded organizational and managerial (and multi-level) view of autonomy effects.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Associate Editor: Lucy Gilson

Author Biographies

Claus W. Langfred (clangfre@gmu.edu) is an associate professor of Management at the School of School of Business at George Mason University. His research revolves around the study of autonomy in teams, as well as the topics of intrateam trust, conflict, and cohesiveness, and has appeared in outlets such as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior and others.

Kevin W. Rockmann is an associate professor of Management at the George Mason School of Business. He studies psychological attachment and relationship formation using theories of identity, social exchange, and motivation, often in distributed, on-demand, and other non-traditional work contexts. His research has appeared in Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and other outlets.

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