Suppose a business needs ten hours of purchasing work each week. Orders need placing, suppliers need following up, and shortages need attention. The need is real. On its own, it may not justify a full-time position.
To secure approval, the manager adds inventory analysis, reporting, process improvement, system maintenance and “support to operations.” Some additions may be useful. Together they make a stronger case for a hire.
The purchasing requirement is reasonably clear. The rest may be a mixture of important work, occasional projects and expectations that nobody has translated into an actual job. The person hired will be expected to deliver all of it.
This hypothetical example exposes a decision made before recruiting begins: the business has bundled several needs into one position without establishing whether they belong together, whether one person can meet them, or what successful delivery will look like.
How the expectation changes
The manager hires someone with purchasing experience. The person knows how to place orders, work with suppliers and recognize supply problems. That was the expertise the business originally needed.
Then the added responsibilities become part of the performance conversation. Why has inventory accuracy not improved? Why is the reporting still poor? Why has nobody repaired the system? The manager expected someone who would take these problems away and require little involvement.
“Improve reporting” does not tell a new employee which decisions a report must support, which records are reliable or who can authorize changes. “Support operations” gives almost no basis for choosing between competing demands. The employee can stay busy while the manager remains disappointed.
There may also be a capability gap. A good buyer may need training to investigate inventory variance, build a data pipeline or lead a process change. Some people are strong across those areas; others bring depth in a particular function. Either can be valuable. The design of the job should establish which capabilities are actually required and how the person will acquire any that are missing.
In this example, the employer used extra responsibilities to justify a position, then treated those responsibilities as if the hire had arrived fully equipped to carry them. The approval document became a performance standard without the intervening work of defining it. The employee is effectively being asked to design the rest of the role while already being judged on its performance.
Research gives a reason to take that ambiguity seriously. A 2008 meta-analysis in Personnel Psychology found that unclear role expectations were associated with poorer job performance. Role ambiguity was among the stressors most strongly linked to lower performance in the review. The managerial question is whether the duties, priorities and definition of success were clear enough to give the person a fair basis for delivering. Gilboa and colleagues, 2008
More recent work examines fit within a person’s working day. Two experience-sampling studies published in 2025 linked the match between a task’s demands and employees’ perceived capabilities with their reported intrinsic motivation; motivation from the preceding task also mattered. My practical conclusion is to examine the fit of each responsibility we add to a job. Someone’s enthusiasm and competence in one part of the role cannot settle the design of the rest. Fu and colleagues, 2025
Make the added work defensible
Combining responsibilities can produce a good job. Purchasing and inventory decisions may benefit from the same person's understanding of suppliers, demand and stock. The question is whether the combination has been deliberately designed.
Each added responsibility should have an operating reason to exist. Someone should be able to explain the result it is meant to produce, its priority, the decisions involved and the capability it requires. The person carrying it needs access to the information and authority necessary to act. Where development is expected, the time and support belong in the plan.
A temporary problem also needs an end. Rebuilding a purchasing workbook might be a useful project. After it is finished, the business needs to know what work remains. A permanent salary cannot be justified indefinitely by a project whose completion should remove the need for it.
Available time deserves the same scrutiny. Ten hours of predictable work is different from ten hours scattered unpredictably across a week, with urgent shortages between scheduled tasks. Response coverage has value and should be specified. It still does not establish that the person covering purchasing can also perform every analytical or technical task attached to the role.
Before approving the position, I would want the manager and the eventual employee to be able to describe the same job: its essential outputs, its priorities and what good performance means. A broad role can be clear. An undefined role can be impossible to satisfy even when its workload looks modest.
Buy the capability the business needs
The ten-hour purchasing requirement gives the business a concrete starting point. It could be covered by a person already in the organization, a suitable part-time hire or an agreed external service. Inventory analysis might belong with that work. A system repair might be a separate project. Those decisions should follow the actual dependencies and capabilities involved.
That is the opportunity I see for Allelon Working Collaborative. A business can bring us a function it needs carried, a specific problem it needs solved or a larger operating change. We can examine the work and agree on the contribution, drawing on people whose abilities I know through working alongside them.
The client should receive a defined responsibility with the right expertise behind it. A contributor should be asked to do work that fits their strengths and agreed commitment. Where the assignment crosses specialties, coordinating our people is part of what we must deliver.
My experience includes production-floor improvement and operational-excellence projects, as well as customer service, logistics, scheduling, systems and integrated business planning. I’ve worked on efficiency, product flow, changeovers and safety issues on the floor. I value broad experience. I also know that putting several functions in one job description does not create that experience in the person hired. A business can access those capabilities in more than one arrangement.
Keep responsibility clear
Changing the contract does not finish the design. An outside service can inherit the same vague expectations as an employee. If the client still wants “someone to handle everything,” the work has to be clarified before anyone can responsibly price it or promise to deliver it.
The agreement needs to say what will be done, when someone must be available, which decisions they can make and how changes in the work will be handled. Performance can then be assessed against work both parties understood, with direct discussion when the need changes.
The practical test comes before the next job posting: can the business explain what it needs without relying on a list of extra duties to make the position look worthwhile?
If ten hours of necessary work is the answer, start there. Establish how that function will be carried reliably. Give every additional responsibility its own justification, then choose an arrangement that brings the required abilities together. That gives the business a clearer purchase and the person doing the work a fair chance to succeed.