eh. Any time someone uses a phrase like "is in the best interests of the company" I think of the movie "Office Space".
You see, every company has a culture, and culture is much more than slogans. If from the very beginning the employee felt like he couldn't speak up "because it was not in his job description" then there's something deeply wrong about the culture, slogan or not.
Yeah, I was hoping to find an article about giving your employees more autonomy and letting them work on projects that interest them. The title was slightly misleading to me.
I work at a company where this ideology is implemented. There are no "managers", and we are expected to manage ourselves.
The company has divided itself into 2 camps:
1) Design guru - this person does not need to collaborate with anyone (i.e. the mechanical engineer is perfectly competent at designing electronics) because they already know everything. They don't speak to anyone else in the company until they mess something up, at which point they just ask someone else to fix it for them.
2) The other group is perfectly capable of collaborating and working with other people. This group gets things done elegantly and efficiently.
In other words, if group 1 and group 2 were given the same task, group 1 people would end up with a kludge that took twice as long to design than group 2.
So what's the balance? When interviewing job candidates, how do you determine what kind of employee you will be getting? What do you do about the people you already hired?
The problem is that many good people are just as confident and stubborn about subjects they know nothing of as about subjects they know a lot about. Sure, having a company full of people who know themselves is the best answer, but that's hard. your field is much wider if you can deal with arrogance.
I have had the problem of good technical people asking me to rewrite my business plan.
One way of dealing with that kind of arrogance is to have upper management that lets each person make the decisions they know the most about. It requires good management, but it means that you can hire people who do not modify their confidence level based on their experience.
You see, every company has a culture, and culture is much more than slogans. If from the very beginning the employee felt like he couldn't speak up "because it was not in his job description" then there's something deeply wrong about the culture, slogan or not.