How unnecessary approvals build administrative load
Unnecessary approvals build administrative burden at work by moving decisions away from the people doing the job. What research says about red tape and control, and a five-statement check.
Unnecessary approvals build administrative burden at work by taking time and attention away from the work a role exists to do, and by moving decisions away from the people who do it. Each sign-off adds a wait, a hand-off and a record to keep for the person who needs it, and a queue for the person who gives it.
OHA calls this administrative load, one of the Five Loads. The term is OHA's. The research below describes its parts: red tape, little control over your own work, and decisions that people judge unfair.
What is administrative load, and what is it not?
Administrative load is the weight of reporting, approvals, systems work and process compliance that displaces leadership work without producing leadership value. Ordinary administration keeps an organization accountable and safe; the load is the part that has stopped earning its place.
In the Five Loads framework, OHA looks for three signals: leadership work that happens last, the same figures reported in more than one system, and approval queues owned by one manager. All three show in a calendar and an inbox before anyone calls them a problem.
It is not the same as a heavy workload. A heavy workload can be work a person wants to do. Administrative load is the part of the week nobody would choose to keep if the approval were taken away.
What are the signs that approvals have built up administrative load?
The signs show in how people describe their week and where their hours go. The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS) publishes a hazard checklist for psychological health and safety, and three of its examples fit. People say that decisions about work rules, such as approving or refusing leave and training requests, are inappropriate or unfair. They say they have many priority projects and little say in decisions. And they work extra time, through breaks or after hours, to finish.
Three questions turn those signs into something a leader can check this week. How many approvals does a manager's typical week depend on? Whose queue holds the most of them? And how often is one refused? An approval that nobody refuses is a cost with no visible control attached to it.
The check below uses five statements, one per load, so you see administrative load next to the other four.
Five Loads quick check · 1 minute
Find the load consuming your team's capacity.
Five statements, about a minute. See all five loads side by side. Answer for your own role, or for a manager you work with: how often is each of these true?
Statement 1 of 5
Is red tape harder on people than a demanding job?
Research suggests it can be. In 2005, a meta-analysis in the Academy of Management Journal by LePine, Podsakoff and LePine used a distinction from earlier research. Challenge stressors, such as high workload, time pressure and high responsibility, are demands that managers see as obstacles worth overcoming. Hindrance stressors, such as red tape, organizational politics and role ambiguity, are demands that managers see as getting in the way of growth and goals for no good reason.
Across the studies it combined, the two groups together explained 39 percent of the variance in strain, and the hindrance group carried more than twice the weight of the challenge group (regression weights of .50 and .23). Hindrance stressors related negatively to motivation, while challenge stressors related positively.
The limit matters. Red tape sits inside the hindrance group, so the result describes the group, not approvals alone. What it supports is a narrow point: demands that managers see as getting in the way relate more strongly to strain than demands they see as worth overcoming. That is the case for asking, of every approval, what it protects.
What happens to control when every decision needs a sign-off?
An approval moves a decision from the person doing the work to someone further from it, which lowers that person's decision latitude. In 1979, Robert Karasek defined job strain as high job demands combined with low decision latitude, and concluded that redesigning work to give a broad range of workers more latitude could reduce mental strain without changing the demands tied to output.
Karasek's paper does not discuss approvals; the step from latitude to sign-offs is OHA's reading. CCOHS reaches a similar place from the practice side. It says that increased demands without opportunities for control result in physical, psychological and emotional fatigue, and that employees who do not feel they have a voice tend to feel indifference or helplessness.
Approvals also raise a fairness question. Quebec's CNESST names organizational justice, which is workers' assessment of whether policies and decisions are fair, among the psychosocial risk factors, and low decision-making autonomy among them. The CCOHS checklist gives approval decisions on leave and training as its own example of decisions workers may judge unfair. An approval step that nobody can explain adds that risk to the delay.
What should a leader remove first?
Start with the approvals that are almost never refused, because they add delay without adding control. List every approval one role depends on: what it asks for, who gives it, how long it takes and how often it is refused. Then sort them.
Remove the ones that protect against nothing. Move the ones that guard something small to the person doing the work, with a clear limit. Keep, and explain, the ones that guard a real risk. This is design work: the change is to the job, not to the person in it.
Pick one role and one change, set a date, and answer the same five statements again in about 90 days, the length of OHA's Capacity Circle™, so the comparison rests on the same questions. For how a full diagnostic reads all five loads across a function, see what a capacity diagnostic actually measures. A flat score is information too: it tells you the change was not the one consuming capacity.
What OHA does about this
OHA's Capacity Diagnostic is built to measure administrative load next to the other four loads, show where approvals and reporting concentrate in each function, and measure again at 90 days with the same instrument. The work that follows is designed to help remove or reassign what a role should not carry. To see where this load sits in your organization, book a Capacity Diagnostic.
Book a Capacity DiagnosticSources
- Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS), Psychological Health and Safety Program - Assessing Psychosocial Hazards, 2022.
- LePine, Podsakoff and LePine, Academy of Management Journal 48(5), 764-775, A Meta-Analytic Test of the Challenge Stressor-Hindrance Stressor Framework, 2005.
- Karasek, Administrative Science Quarterly 24(2), 285-308, Job Demands, Job Decision Latitude, and Mental Strain, 1979.
- Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS), Mental Health - Psychosocial Risk Factors in the Workplace, 2023.
- CNESST, Facteurs de risques psychosociaux liés au travail, n.d. (page in French).