Leadership Today - Practical Tips For LeadersEpisode 242 - How to Give People Autonomy When There Isn't Much Freedom
Summary
Autonomy matters for motivation, but what happens when people work in a highly structured environment with lots of rules? New research involving nearly 3,900 NSW Police Force personnel shows that autonomy can still be supported within clear boundaries. This episode looks at how leaders can provide more ownership without removing necessary structure.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to episode 242 of the Leadership Today podcast, where each week we share practical tips to improve your leadership. This week we're looking at autonomy and a question that often comes up in highly structured workplaces: what do you do when there really isn't much choice?
Self-Determination Theory identifies autonomy as one of three basic psychological needs, alongside competence and relatedness. When we experience some ownership and choice over our actions, our motivation and wellbeing tend to be stronger. But what happens when you work somewhere with lots of rules?
Think about healthcare, emergency services, government, aviation or policing. There are policies, procedures, legal requirements and standards that simply have to be followed. A leader can't just say, "Do whatever feels right to you."
So does autonomy still matter in those environments?
A new study involving nearly 3,900 people in the NSW Police Force suggests it does. The researchers found that organisational support was associated with greater satisfaction of people's needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness, along with better outcomes such as commitment and wellbeing. Workplace conflict, on the other hand, was associated with greater frustration of those needs and poorer outcomes. But perhaps the most useful finding for leaders was that people could still experience autonomy in a highly structured command-and-control environment.
The catch is that autonomy doesn't mean independence or complete freedom. It's more about having some sense of ownership over what you're doing. You might have no choice about whether a safety procedure needs to be followed. But there may still be flexibility in how work is organised around that requirement. People might be able to contribute ideas about implementation. They may have discretion within clear boundaries.
Here are three ideas to try.
First, explain the rationale. Sometimes leaders say, "That's just the policy", and technically that might be correct. But where you can, explain why the requirement exists. It's easier to accept a constraint when you understand the reason behind it.
Second, be clear about where choice exists and where it doesn't. You might say, "We have to achieve this outcome and these two requirements aren't negotiable, but you have quite a bit of flexibility around the rest." That's much more helpful than either pretending people have complete freedom or controlling everything unnecessarily.
Third, involve people in the things they can genuinely influence. A team may not be able to remove a mandatory process, but they might be able to improve how it's scheduled, how information is shared or how work is handed over. Those smaller areas of influence still matter.
There's one other useful aspect of the research. The researchers distinguished between a need not being fully satisfied and a need being actively frustrated. Those aren't quite the same thing. You might have a job where there isn't much autonomy, but you don't necessarily feel controlled. That's different from an environment where you're constantly being pressured, micromanaged or prevented from exercising reasonable judgement. In leadership, sometimes you can't increase choice very much. But you can still avoid making things more controlling than they need to be.
Bringing all of this together, the key question isn't, "Can I let people do whatever they want?" It's, "Where can I provide ownership, rationale and discretion within the boundaries we genuinely need?"
Reference
Marsh, H. W., Ryan, R. M., Craven, R. G., Dicke, T., Guo, J., & Parker, P. D. (2026). Workplace demands/resources, basic psychological needs, and police well-being: an extended integration of self-determination theory and job demands–resources models. Current Psychology, 45, Article 1464. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10005-y.
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