The Principle of Responsibility

All the more recent management concepts such as lean management, kaizen an re-engineering can only take hold if people change their attitudes. Indepent initiative and courageous innovations are all the more necessary as companies eliminate managerial positions and the gape between levels in the managerial hierarchy grow. renhard K. Sprenger describes, with the help of many examples, what resonsiblity is and how managers can promote it: by rethinking and making sensible reductions in the scope of their interventions, leaving responibility with their employees, supporting them in their efforts to succeed, requiring and concluding explicit commitment agreements and giving defferentiated feddback messages. He demonstrates why it is impossible to "transfer" responsibility or to "empower" employees. He argues that role models, visions, supervisory control, persecutor games and zero-defects programs are not valid alternatives.