Research: How to Delegate Decision-Making Strategically

Effective delegation is critical to managerial success: delegating properly can help empower employees, and those who delegate can increase their earnings. Delegation can also be a way for managers to give employees experience and control, especially when they delegate decision-making responsibilities, which allow employees to exhibit agency over important stakes. Yet, some of our recent research has shown that employees can view delegated decision-making as a burden that they would prefer to avoid.

Given the managerial importance of delegation, we wanted to better understand the costs employers incur when they pass decision-making tasks to their employees. To examine this, we conducted a series of studies in a paper recently published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. We looked specifically at the interpersonal costs of delegation — how delegation impacts the delegator-delegate relationship — as well as potential remedies for the negative impacts of passing responsibility.

Across our studies, which included 2,478 U.S. participants in a mix of controlled experiments and surveys, we found that delegating decision-making responsibilities, compared with asking employees for advice and maintaining decision-making responsibility, had significant interpersonal costs for delegators. But we also found material ways that managers can alter how and when they delegate decisions, so that employees feel empowered rather than burdened.

The Interpersonal Costs of Decision Delegation

To better understand how delegation impacts employees’ desire to work with delegators in the future, we asked 181 employees to recall a time they had either been asked to make a decision or been asked for advice. Then we asked participants how willing they would be to help the requester with a decision in the future. Those who recalled being delegated to were less willing to help the same person with a future decision – even controlling for whether the outcome of the decision was likely to be positive or negative.

In another study of 195 participants, we asked people to decide between two candidates for a managerial role, but first they interacted with the candidates through an online chat. One candidate asked participants for advice and the other delegated a choice to them. Participants were significantly more likely to hire the advice seeker, rather than the delegating candidate.

We found the same pattern in another experiment involving 173 online workers. The participants were instructed that they would be working on a team and were connected with a teammate in a chat. In the chat, half of the teammates asked the worker to make a decision and the other half asked the worker for advice on the same decision. After fielding this request – to either make or provide advice on a decision – workers had the option to continue working with the same teammate or to end their relationship with the teammate and work with someone else. Workers who had been delegated to, compared with those who were asked for advice, were significantly more likely to end their relationship with the teammate.

Given how detrimental decision delegation can be, we wondered: Are there any factors that can offset these negative effects and improve how employees view delegators?

How to Delegate Decisions

It turns out that the people in our studies thought being asked to make a decision was less fair than being asked for advice, and that this sense of unfairness made them view delegators more negatively. It may seem unfair when someone asks a colleague to take on decision responsibility – and its potential burdens – when the colleague views that responsibility as rightfully the requester’s to shoulder.

So how can managers delegate decisions without seeming unfair? Our research offers three important considerations:

Delegate choices with positive outcomes.

In a controlled experiment, we asked 578 participants to imagine either being asked to make a decision or to give advice. For half of the participants, this decision concerned layoffs (a negative outcome), and for the other half, it concerned bonuses (a positive one). The participants then indicated how fair they felt the requester was.

When the decision concerned layoffs, we again found that decision delegation (versus advice seeking) was interpersonally costly, yielding a lower willingness to provide help with future decisions. Yet when the decision concerned bonuses, there was no cost of decision delegation; those who were delegated to were equally willing to provide future decision support as those asked for advice. We further found this difference related to people’s perceptions of fairness: delegating a positive decision seemed fairer than delegating a negative one.

Give employees responsibility for decisions that fall within their roles.

Managers can also avoid the interpersonal costs of decision delegation when there’s a contextual reason why it may make sense to transfer decision responsibility.

We hypothesized that when a potential decision lies squarely within someone’s wheelhouse, the request to make it would seem more legitimate and be viewed as more fair. For example, in one study we asked participants to imagine that they worked in a bank, and that their manager was delegating the decision for a location for a new branch. We found that participants perceived such delegation as fairer when their assigned role was responsible for real-estate decisions compared with when their role was in charge of employee benefits.

Limit the potential consequences to colleagues.

Finally, managers may be able to avoid the interpersonal costs of decision delegation when the decision primarily affects the delegate alone. We tested this idea in a study where 981 participants imagined being asked about a work-from-home schedule for either themselves or their team’s administrator.

When the decision concerned their own schedule, the interpersonal costs of decision delegation, as compared to advice seeking, disappeared. People may be more willing to take responsibility when only they — rather than their colleagues — may suffer any potential consequences of the choice. . . .

Our research suggests that one-size-fits all guidance exhorting leaders to delegate may miss important nuance. Delegating decisions can carry significant negative interpersonal costs that managers would be wise to weigh alongside the potential benefits of freeing up time and energy.

Our work provides insight into the decision contexts in which these costs are more and less likely to accrue: When the decision outcome has a high potential to have negative consequences, is outside of the employee’s scope of responsibilities, and primarily affects others, there are likely to be interpersonal costs of decision delegation, and managers looking to utilize their employees’ knowledge should ask for advice instead. When these elements are reversed, transferring decision responsibility is likely to be less interpersonally costly and might provide employees a better venue to test out their decision-making skills.

Finally, our work suggests that those seeking to delegate decisions may benefit from pursuing strategies that make their requests seem fairer. For example, delegators could consider framing a decision within the scope of their colleague’s responsibilities or could articulate how they will take active responsibility for any fallout from an employee’s choice. Notably, our study does not directly consider the potential motivational quality of delegated decision-making. For example, it is possible that employees may react more positively if they view making the decision as a path to promotion or advancement.

While delegation may be critical to managerial success, knowing when and when not to delegate may be even more important: Managers who can navigate this effectively can enjoy the benefits of delegation without paying an interpersonal price.

Copyright 2024 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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