Authority and Responsibility: The Root Cause of Workplace Friction

I’ve noticed that almost all internal friction and burnout in the workplace can be traced back to an imbalance between authority and responsibility. When the two are out of sync, two common scenarios emerge:

• Responsibility without Authority: You are held accountable for the outcome, but have no power to make decisions that affect it. This breeds a deep sense of helplessness and ultimately degrades the quality of work.
• Authority without Responsibility: You have the power to call the shots, but don’t have to bear the consequences. This leads to reckless decisions and internal inequity within the organization.

The best depiction of this dynamic is probably from the drama Hanzawa Naoki. The protagonist, Naoki Hanzawa, is a banker who is upright, deeply dedicated to the bank, and despises corruption, bribery, and accounting fraud. Yet, he constantly clashes with superiors who play dirty games.

There’s a memorable scene where a superior assigns Hanzawa a 50 billion yen loan case. In reality, the boss has colluded behind the scenes with Nishi-Osaka Steel, rushing through the formal approval only to pin all the blame on Hanzawa when it goes south. When scolded by the Credit Review Department, Hanzawa shoots back (paraphrasing from memory):

Hanzawa: “You share responsibility for this loan being approved—because it was your department that stamped and authorized it.”

Credit Review: “That’s only because your branch kept rushing us!”

Hanzawa: “If all it takes to get a loan approved is rushing, then getting a loan would be far too easy.”

Credit Review: “We were simply respecting the judgment of the front line.”

Hanzawa: “If you just defer to the front line’s judgment, then the Credit Review Department shouldn’t even exist.”

This scene brilliantly contrasts “authority without responsibility” and “responsibility without authority” in a single moment: the review department holds the authority of the approval stamp but refuses to own the outcome, while Hanzawa is pressured into executing the decision and forced to take the fall.

Why Authority and Responsibility Matter So Much

When people aren’t held accountable for their authority and decisions, decision quality inevitably plummets. For example, if someone controls the budget but bears no responsibility for company revenue, they might decide budget approvals purely based on which teams they personally like.

Development teams run into this all the time:

• The team is tasked with speeding up release cycles, but their proposed improvements are shot down by management. When the quality inevitably suffers, the engineering team takes the blame.
• A refactoring plan is proposed, but leadership ignores the importance of technical debt. When the system becomes unstable, the engineers bear the brunt, fighting fires and patching hotfixes daily.

The fallout from misaligned authority and responsibility is hard to quantify in the short term because it’s mostly psychological. Employees with responsibility but no authority feel like no matter how hard they try, nothing ever changes. In the long run, the toll is obvious: employees lose all motivation to innovate; they simply follow orders and gradually lose their sense of ownership.

In the book The Soul of a Perfect Decision (完美決定之魂), it’s stated: those unwilling to delegate authority are committing an organizational sin.

Authority must stem from responsibility. Take a founder who funds 100% of a company: because they shoulder the responsibility of keeping the business profitable, they naturally have 100% control, and their word is final. The founder bears the risk of bankruptcy and missed payrolls, but also reaps the rewards when a product succeeds. Employees don’t take on the risk of corporate bankruptcy, but neither do their paychecks automatically scale when the company turns a profit.

Many business owners demand that employees treat their work with relentless dedication. But demanding it out of thin air is futile. If you want employees to hustle like a founder, give them equity.

Conversely, designing an effective incentive structure is a far better way to foster employee growth. In machine learning, there is the concept of an objective function: the training process is simply minimizing the loss function while maximizing the objective. A model won’t do what you “hope” it does; it will only do what minimizes its loss.

Organizations work the same way. Employees (and teams) will optimize for what you actually reward, not what you merely pay lip service to.

Practical Approaches

The solution is straightforward: delegation and incentive design. Delegate authority strictly within the bounds of a person’s responsibilities, and make the reward function as unambiguous as possible.

For example: if a development team’s goal is to “reduce average deployment time by 50%,” give them the autonomy to purchase CI/CD tooling within a set budget without sign-offs, choose their tech stack, and adjust architecture without needing item-by-item approvals. Reward them with bonuses if they hit the target; withhold the reward if they don’t. The key is: the scope of authority must match the scope of responsibility. If you want the dev team to be accountable for deployment velocity, stop micromanaging every detail.

However, the reward function must be designed with extreme care. If you set token usage or lines of code as a KPI, you’ll end up with millions of lines of useless boilerplate. The same applies to story points. Once metrics face top-down scrutiny, work often devolves into performance theater: employees game the metrics to look good on paper while concealing the reality. On the dashboard, velocity looks great with tons of story points, but it’s just inflated numbers to keep leadership happy.

Many organizations fail to grasp the importance of matching responsibility with authority. When issues arise, they blame employees. When employees try to fix them, management critiques their direction. Eventually, frustrated leaders step in to do the work themselves, leaving zero bandwidth for higher-priority initiatives. This is a common trap for middle managers and founders alike.

The remedy is to realign authority and responsibility: grant employees the proper autonomy, and step back from their decisions—intervening only on critical, high-level choices.

What if they fail? You should allow employees room to fail within controlled boundaries. Growth is only possible through firsthand experience. If clear goals and incentives were established upfront, a failure simply means iterating better next time. But if you demand responsibility without handing over authority, employees will naturally blame you when things go wrong—and grow resentful over missing out on their rewards.

Here are a few actionable suggestions:

• If you are an employee looking to grow: Proactively align expectations with your manager regarding your goals and scope of authority. Clarify what the reward will be upon hitting those goals, and define exactly where your responsibilities lie.
• If you are an employee wanting to maintain the status quo: Audit your recent work, clearly define and protect the boundaries of your role, and refuse to take the fall for things outside your scope. Helping colleagues out is fine as a short-term courtesy, but only aligned incentives are sustainable.
• If you are a manager: Reflect on your company’s immediate objectives. What authority are you willing to delegate to your team? What rewards will they receive when goals are met? Are their responsibilities backed by sufficient authority? Document this clearly—the clearer, the better.

Managing Expectations

While the above covers organizational design, as an employee working in a system that hasn’t figured this out yet, what you can control is “expectation management.” This was an important career lesson Denny once shared with me. He noted that much of workplace frustration comes from a mismatch between input and output:

“I worked so hard, so why didn’t I get the reward I deserved?” —Denny

Reflecting on this, he was right. Being the consummate utility player—updating docs one moment, squashing bugs the next, fielding customer support queries—sounds noble, but is that what leadership actually cares about? Usually not.

Expectation management is vital because it reveals what both sides genuinely expect from each other. It prevents scenarios where you think: “I went above and beyond doing A, B, C, D, and E, but my boss only ever cared about F.” Conversely, once you nail F, items A through E become valuable leverage for promotions and performance reviews.

Achieving a perfect equilibrium between authority and responsibility is tough. Within your own sphere of influence, the approach I recommend is: “Treat work that technically isn’t yours as your own, and care deeply about the results.”

For instance, suppose you are asked to calculate the monthly cloud infrastructure costs for a client. You can push your thinking a step further: Why does the client need monthly costs right now? Observing the context, you might realize they are trying to figure out product pricing. You could pull the current MAU and DAU metrics, compute the sign-up conversion rate, and assuming a target gross margin of 50%, project a suggested pricing model based on those numbers.

This strategy offers two advantages:

• If the client actually needed those insights, they’ll be immensely grateful.
• Even if they don’t, you went into it knowing it was extra credit, so you won’t feel cheated.

In your career, it pays to focus heavily on high-upside tasks: initiatives where the payoff for success is substantial, but the cost of failure is negligible.

The Workplace as a Stage

Yet, even with sound expectation management and hard-won alignment between authority and responsibility, you’ll still encounter things you cannot change.

A profound realization I’ve had recently is that work often feels like pure theater, where over 90% of the daily hustle doesn’t truly matter. In many environments, the script is already written and the rules are set; we are all just playing our assigned parts. When you despise the rules of the game but are forced to play along, that becomes the ultimate source of internal friction and burnout.

Take the expectation management and authority-responsibility design discussed here—as I mentioned in my post on resigning, you don’t necessarily have to play this game. Why should you accept arbitrary metrics you fundamentally disagree with instead of being empowered to fix obvious flaws?

Once you see the script for what it is, you really have three options:

1. Play along, but negotiate for the terms you want (Expectation Management).
2. Attempt to rewrite the script (Push for aligned authority and responsibility).
3. Step off the stage and find a new one.

None of these paths is inherently right or wrong; it’s simply a matter of what trade-offs you are willing to make. Perhaps it’s worth exploring possibilities outside of traditional corporate employment. (I’m definitely not advising everyone to quit on the spot!)