Where does delegation collide?

In management, delegation is the act by which a manager assigns responsibility for a task, and the authority to carry it out, to a subordinate, while remaining accountable for the result. Leana's 1986 study Predictors and consequences of delegation treated it as a measurable feature of how a supervisor distributes work and decision rights across a team, and asked what leads managers to delegate and what follows when they do. The referent here is a working relationship between a boss and an employee inside an organization, scaled by how much discretion is handed down. It is not the transfer of law-making power to a government agency, one object forwarding a request to another in a program, or a group of people sent to represent a country.[1]

Unit

One handing-down of a task and its authority from a manager to a subordinate

Recovery means

The delegating manager keeps accountability and can withdraw the authority, so the task can be reclaimed

Measured by

Operationalised through ratings of how much authority and discretion supervisors report handing to subordinates

In constitutional and administrative law, delegation is the transfer of authority from one branch of government to another body, most often a legislature granting an executive agency the power to make binding rules within limits it sets. Sunstein's 2000 article Nondelegation canons examined the doctrine that constrains how far a legislature may hand its law-making power to others, and the interpretive rules courts use to police that boundary. The referent is a constitutional relationship between institutions, judged by the scope and limits of the power conveyed. It differs from a manager handing a task to an employee, an object passing a request to a helper object in software, or the team of people a state sends to a negotiation.[2]

Unit

One grant of law-making or decision power from one public body to another

Recovery means

The granting body can amend or repeal the enabling statute, and courts can strike a delegation that exceeds constitutional limits

Measured by

Assessed by legal analysis of the enabling statute's scope, the standards it imposes, and judicial review of whether those limits were exceeded

In object-oriented programming, delegation is a technique in which one object handles a request by passing it on to a second, helper object that does the work, so behaviour can be reused at run time without inheriting from a class. Lieberman's 1986 paper Using prototypical objects to implement shared behavior in object-oriented systems set out delegation as an alternative to class inheritance, letting a prototype object stand in for shared behaviour that other objects forward to. The referent is a wiring of responsibilities between software objects, described by which object receives a call and which one it defers to. It has nothing to do with a manager assigning a task, a legislature granting rule-making power, or a group of envoys representing a nation.[3]

Unit

One object's forwarding of a request to another object that fulfils it

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified in source code by objects that hold a reference to a helper and forward calls to it rather than implementing them directly