ABSTRACT
When a manager spells out the specific demands of a job, the employee is constrained to act within its limits. It would be inviting to the ambitious and the creative to be told ‘I want you to come into this job and see what you can make of it’, but only in the very senior reaches of management are jobs normally given such elastic boundaries. Even in the case of the core work, itself the starting-point for the application of work roles, it is rare to find that the average jobholder will depart very far from what he or she is required to do. It is seldom a matter of laziness or lack of initiative. There are definite hazards facing employees who cheerily wander over their job boundaries. One illustration is the complaints one hears about newly appointed graduates who disregard protocol or who ‘poke their nose into other people's business’. What is usually meant is that they have encroached, often innocently, into some incumbent's closely guarded territory. Conversely, the virtues of circumspection are much appreciated. Those with limited abilities, who never put a foot wrong in their dealings with other people and other departments, often earn themselves a secure position.
