Sometimes, upper management is not well enough aware of their employees’ backgrounds that they’ll delegate a task ill-suited to the worker’s experience. In such cases, it’s easier for the employee to accept the new job responsibility than to respectfully refuse it on the basis of being under-qualified. Reasons for the ease of acceptance/difficulty of refusal:

1. Refusal on said basis implicitly challenges the supervisor’s knowledge of what the capabilities of the people they supervise are. This is an embarrassing situation for any supervisor to be put in and, in an effort to remove themselves from it, they may make a penalizing action against the employee, stubbornly steadfast in their belief that their original task delegation was without flaw.

2. In the culture, there is a strong perception that career progress correlates with added responsibilities. While generally true, the perception fails for refusing to acknowledge the importance of being able to discern justifiable responsibilities from those that aren’t. Consequently, the false premise that, in order to advance, all responsibilities handed down from above must be accepted has a controlling presence in the work environment.

3. The likelihood that the employee will successfully complete the task if they refuse it is zero. In accepting a task they’ve never had any experience with, there is a chance, however small, that they’ll succeed.

In a cold, money-driven outlook, management’s motivation for assigning more responsibility may be to determine the maximum work output they can extract from each employee in the standard 40hr work week. It’s the only definitive way to deduce each individual’s work limit. Until an employee accepts added responsibility and subsequently fails to meet all their commitments, they may only have been working at 85% capacity, just short of the target upper nineties.

I saw a cute thing the other day: a mother with her two children, maybe ages five and three; the daughter looking after her younger brother protectively, pulling gently at his jacket for him to sit down next to her.