When the Job Isn't the Job: How Illegitimate Tasks Dampen Innovation in the Public Sector
A new study in Public Administration Review finds that assigning public servants duties outside their proper role quietly erodes their innovative work behavior — not directly, but by narrowing the cognitive flexibility that new ideas depend on. Strikingly, a close personal bond with one's leader makes the damage worse rather than better.
Context
Public agencies rarely run on clean job descriptions. Bureaucratic layering, thin staffing, and improvised leadership decisions push work onto whoever is available, and officers end up handling duties that have little to do with the role they were hired and trained for — an urban planning officer staffing a traffic hotline, to borrow the paper's example. These assignments are what the organizational-behavior literature calls illegitimate tasks: duties that violate established role expectations.
The practical question for administrators is whether this is merely an annoyance or a real cost. Governments increasingly ask their workforces to innovate — to redesign services, adopt new tools, and solve problems that standard procedure does not cover. If off-role assignments quietly undercut exactly that capacity, then a scheduling convenience turns into a policy problem.
Methods
The study draws on multi-wave survey data collected from public servants in Vietnam together with ratings from their managers, so that the behavior being explained is not simply self-reported by the same people reporting the tasks. The authors use hierarchical model analyses to test an indirect pathway — from illegitimate tasks to cognitive flexibility to innovative work behavior — and to test whether two distinct forms of trust in leaders, relationship-based and character-based, change the strength of that pathway.
Key findings
Illegitimate tasks do not suppress innovation head-on; they work through cognitive flexibility, the mental capacity to shift frames and consider alternatives, which in turn shapes innovative work behavior.
Relationship-based trust in a leader — the bond built on personal closeness and loyalty — makes the effect of illegitimate tasks on cognitive flexibility worse, not better.
Trust grounded in a leader's character and integrity does not show the same amplifying effect, suggesting the two forms of trust behave differently under strain.
The authors read this as a case for limiting off-role assignments outright, and as a caution that the personal loyalty managers often cultivate can carry hidden costs in difficult working conditions.
Policy implications
The authors highlight the need to minimize illegitimate task assignments and reveal the potential drawbacks of relationship-based trust in such adverse work conditions.
Keywords:
Illegitimate Tasks
Innovative Work Behavior
Cognitive Flexibility
Trust In Leaders
Public Sector Management
Link:
Citation:
Nguyen, N., Tuan, L. T., & Khai, D. C. (2025). How Illegitimate Tasks Inhibit Public Sector Employees' Innovative Work Behavior: The Roles of Cognitive Flexibility and Trust in Leaders. Public Administration Review, 86(2), 445-458.
