Most people have had the experience of being told they are in charge of something and then discovering that they cannot tell what state it is in. A manager is accountable for a team's month-end figures but receives them on the fifth working day, in a spreadsheet that someone else prepared. A supervisor can approve overtime but cannot see how many hours have already been worked. The authority is real. The footing underneath it is not.
This piece explores a simple hypothesis: that a person's sense of agency at work depends heavily on whether the information in front of them is reliable. It is reasoned from general research on working conditions and from how business systems behave, not from a survey of South African employers, and the example below is illustrative.
Authority without a reliable picture
We usually talk about agency as a matter of permission: who is allowed to decide, who may sign, who has the final say. Permission matters, but it is only half of the picture. To act on a decision you need to know what you are deciding about. If the stock figure might be wrong, the customer's balance might be out of date, or two reports disagree, then even a fully empowered person hesitates. They check with a colleague, wait for a reconciliation, or decide cautiously and later find out the decision was based on yesterday's reality.
The World Health Organization's fact sheet on mental health at work lists a lack of control over job design or workload and an unclear job role among the psychosocial risks to mental health at work. Unreliable information is not named there as such, but it is a close relative. A role is hard to understand, and a workload is hard to control, when the facts about the work keep shifting.
The UK Health and Safety Executive's management standard on role asks organisations to keep the requirements they set for employees clear and to give people information that helps them understand their responsibilities. That is a standard about clarity, and clarity depends on the underlying records being something a person can lean on.
An illustrative example
Consider a hypothetical South African distribution business with about forty staff. The branch manager is told she owns her branch's margins. In practice, the margin report is produced centrally, three weeks after the month closes, from a mix of exports. Discounts granted by the sales team sit in one system, supplier rebates in another, and freight costs are keyed in by hand. By the time the report arrives, the decisions it might have informed have already been taken.
The manager is not powerless on paper. She can change prices, drop a slow line or renegotiate a delivery run. But every such decision is a guess made against a number she does not trust. So she does what sensible people do in that position. She keeps her own private spreadsheet, rings the finance team before each significant decision and tends to defer anything that cannot be reversed. Her agency has not been removed by a rule. It has been worn down by uncertainty.
Nothing here is a finding about a real company. The scenario is built to show a mechanism: responsibility that is not matched by timely, trustworthy information tends to push capable people towards caution and checking.
What reliable information actually means
Reliable does not mean perfect. It means that a person can answer three questions without asking someone else.
- Is this current? The figure should say when it was last updated, and the delay should be short enough for the decision at hand.
- Is this the only version? If two reports can show different numbers for the same thing, people spend their energy arguing about which one is right. The pattern is explored in why reports cannot agree on the same number.
- Who stands behind it? A figure with a named owner can be corrected. A figure with no owner tends to be corrected only when it embarrasses someone.
Nielsen Norman Group's article on visibility of system status makes a related point about software: when status information is missing or hard to read, users feel powerless, and when systems change things silently, trust erodes. Their advice, not to blindfold users, applies as well to an operations dashboard as to a shopping basket.
The question of whether data is good enough to operate with is treated more fully in what makes data good enough to operate with. The point for this piece is narrower. Good-enough data is not only a technical property. It is a condition for people to use the authority they have been given.
What changes when information can be trusted
The immediate consequence of reliable information is fewer verification loops. A person who trusts the number stops phoning to confirm it, stops keeping a shadow copy and stops waiting for a colleague to sign off a figure that was never in doubt. That returns time, which is one human dividend. The more interesting one is autonomy: the ability to make a call, stand behind it and move on.
There is a business outcome too. Decisions get made closer to the work, so fewer of them queue up for senior people. This links to the wider theme in why management has poor visibility into the business, where the same weakness appears from the top of the organisation. The difference here is that the effect is felt at every level, by the people who are told they are responsible but cannot see enough to be so.
It is worth saying what this does not claim. It does not claim that better data makes people happier, or that every frustrated manager is frustrated by information. Many things constrain agency, including budgets, staffing and the plain pressure of a hard market. Reliable information is one condition among several, and a necessary-looking one rather than a sufficient one.
Where the trade-offs sit
Making information reliable has costs, and some of them fall on people.
- Visibility cuts both ways. The same accurate figures that help a manager decide can be used to judge her. If people suspect that better data mainly serves surveillance, they may resist the very changes that would help them. The UK standard on change stresses consulting staff and explaining why changes are proposed, which is relevant when new reporting is introduced.
- Accuracy needs upkeep. A clean dataset decays unless somebody owns its quality. That is ongoing work, and it is often invisible work.
- False confidence is a risk. A polished dashboard can make people trust a number more than it deserves. Reliability has to be earned in the underlying records, not painted on top.
- Some decisions will still be judgement calls. Information reduces uncertainty; it does not remove the need for discretion.
There is also a legal dimension for personal information. South Africa's Information Regulator explains that people can ask a responsible party to correct personal information that is inaccurate, out of date, incomplete or misleading. Whatever the business reason for tidy records, individuals have their own stake in the accuracy of what is held about them, and that deserves respect rather than treatment as a compliance chore.
Interpreting the pattern
The Mellorca reading is cautious. In some businesses, the quiet frustration of people who are accountable but poorly informed may be traceable to how records are created, copied and reconciled. The root mechanism is often ordinary: data entered twice, systems that disagree and reports built by hand. The cause is described in poor data as an operations problem, and it is usually fixable without heroics, by agreeing which record is the source and who maintains it.
What a reader might take away is modest. Before asking whether people feel empowered, it can help to ask whether they can see enough, soon enough and with enough confidence to use the power they already have. For some teams the answer will be yes, and the constraint lies elsewhere. For others, the quickest route to more agency may be a number they no longer need to double-check.
The test is practical. Pick one decision that a person in your business is meant to make alone. Ask what they look at before making it, how old that information is and how often they confirm it with someone else. The answers will show whether the authority is resting on solid ground.
Sources and further reading
- Mental health at work (last verified 10 October 2026)
- Management Standards - Role - HSE (last verified 10 October 2026)
- Visibility of System Status (last verified 10 October 2026)
- https://inforegulator.org.za/popia/ (last verified 10 October 2026)
Related Mellorca reading
- What Real Delegation Requires From Systems
- The Freedom That Comes From Knowing Where Things Stand
- When Monitoring Replaces Trust