Prefer Doing the Right Thing Instead of the Job Description Fallacy

Fleeting

When discussing the need to be appropriately engaged in a company, sometimes people say that one should try to do the right thing rather than blindly following the job description.

I think that not only this is a straw man fallacy, when one claims that being appropriately engaged is about blindly following a document, however stupid it might be.

But also, I think that this is a bad argument, because it suppose that one can know what the right thing is without having clarified with anybody, as if one would know better than anyone in the company what is good for it.

I think that the correct way to behave is to discuss the matter with people involved in the company to make crystal clear your role in a collaborative action. Actually, I believe that job descriptions and roles should be living and very dynamic¹. The fact that they are not is no excuse to pretend that doing things on your own without involving people that are impacted by your action (a.k.a. being appropriately engaged).

In other terms:

in a job description becomes a goal, it stops being a good job description

• see,
  • lorsqu’un objectif instrumental est utilisé comme un objectif final, il sert d’être un bon objectif instrumental,

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