How much freedom do you have to do your job as a manager? What factors place limits on your effectiveness? More importantly, what can you do about such limitations? Rosemary Stewart developed a concept which enables jobs to be examined in three important ways:

1. the demands of the job, which are what the job-holder must do
2. the constraints, which limit what the job-holder can do
3. the choices, which indicate how much freedom the job-holder has to do the work in the way they choose

Stewart’s purpose was to show how dealing appropriately with demands and constraints, and exercising choices, can improve managers’ effectiveness. Consider the following two examples.

Job A

Simon manages a team of health and safety training officers in a large chemicals company. Although he has a general responsibility for ensuring that staff receive appropriate training, he has little influence on the content of training sessions as a result of health and safety legislation laid down by country laws and when training takes place, but he can influence how the training is provided and other aspects of it.

Job B

Arshia manages a drop-in advice centre for homeless teenagers. She has relative freedom in deciding what, when and how assistance is offered within the range of organizational capability. The management committee has just set out a new strategic direction for the organization which Arshia believes can be improved on, and which she can influence.

Note the differences between the demands and constraints imposed in each case, and how these demands and constraints will place limitations on the respective choices that Simon and Arshia can make.

Demands of the job

Demands are what anyone in the job must do. They can be ‘performance demands’ requiring the achievement of a certain minimum standard of performance, or they can be ‘behavioral demands’ requiring that you undertake some activity such as attending certain meetings or preparing a budget. Stewart lists the sources of such demands as being:

• Manager-imposed demands – work that your own line manager expects and that you cannot disregard without penalty.
• Peer-imposed demands – requests for services, information or help from others at similar levels in the organization. Failure to respond personally would produce penalties.
• Externally-imposed demands – requests for information or action from people outside the organization that cannot be delegated and where there would be penalties for non-response.
• System-imposed demands – reports and budgets that cannot be ignored nor wholly delegated, meetings that must be attended, social functions that cannot be avoided.
• Staff-imposed demands – minimum time that must be spent with your direct reports (for example, guiding or appraising) to avoid penalties.
• Self-imposed demands – these are the expectations that you choose to create in others about what you will do; from the work that you feel you must do because of your personal standards or habits.

Constraints

Constraints are the factors, within the organization and outside it, that limit what the job-holder can do. Examples include:

• resource limitations – the amounts and kinds of resources available
• legal regulations
• trade union agreements
• technological limitations – limitations imposed by the processes and equipment with which the manager has to work
• physical location of the manager and his or her unit
• organizational policies and procedures
• people’s attitudes and expectations – their willingness to accept, or tolerate, what the manager wants to do

For today’s world we would add factors to this list which will impose constraints such as:

• ethics – your own and those to which your organization adheres
• the environment – climate change and remediation.

Choices

Many managerial jobs offer opportunities for choices both in what is done and how it is done, though the amount and nature of choice vary. Managers can also exercise choice by emphasizing some aspects of the job and neglecting others. Often they will do so partly unconsciously. The main choices are usually in:

• what work is done
• how the work is done
• when the work is done.

Analysis of your job using these concepts of demands, constraints and choices can be revealing, particularly if it leads to the recognition that one or other aspect needs changing.

Note that demands and constraints also apply to many employees who work in the organization. Choices, however, may not apply to employees doing highly routine jobs.

References

Stewart, R. (1982). The relevance of some studies of managerial work and behavior to leadership research. In J.G. Hunt, C. A. Schriescheim, & J. Sekaran (Eds.), Leadership: Beyond establishment views. (pp. 30-46). Carbondale, IL: Southern

Acknowledgements

Adapted from The Open University’s OpenLearn (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk) material entitled Managing and managing people under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence. As such, it is also made available under the same licence agreement.