What is autonomy-supportive management?
Micromanagement is excessive control over how capable people perform work, often expressed through unnecessary approvals, prescriptive methods, or monitoring that exceeds the task’s real risk.
Explore whether your management creates clear ownership and useful visibility—or unnecessary control.
Answer as you are today
Choose the answer that best describes your recent behaviour at work. No email required.
What does autonomy-supportive management mean?
Micromanagement is excessive control over how capable people perform work, often expressed through unnecessary approvals, prescriptive methods, or monitoring that exceeds the task’s real risk.
Why it matters at work
Leaders still need standards and visibility. The useful distinction is whether oversight clarifies risk and enables ownership, or merely reassures the manager while slowing decisions and reducing autonomy.
What this assessment measures
Outcome clarity
Defining the result, constraints, and decision rights without prescribing every move.
Autonomy & trust
Allowing capable people to choose methods and make bounded decisions.
Proportionate visibility
Using agreed checkpoints instead of continuous intervention.
How to interpret your score
Your overall result is normalised to a 0–100 scale. Use it to choose a practice area, not to compare your worth with somebody else.
Build your autonomy-supportive management foundation
Your answers point to recurring situations where a simple routine could make this skill more reliable.
A useful autonomy-supportive management base
You already show this skill in some situations. The opportunity is to make it more dependable under pressure or ambiguity.
A strong autonomy-supportive management pattern
Your answers suggest a reliable pattern. Keep testing it in harder situations and focus on the dimension that trails the others.
Designed for reflection, not diagnosis
The ten behaviour-based statements cover 3 practical dimensions. Responses run from “Never” to “Almost always”; negatively worded items are reverse-scored. Overall and dimension results are converted to a 0–100 scale. The assessment is educational and has not been psychometrically validated.
Read the full assessment methodology and editorial standards.
Research that informed this page
Frederick P. Morgeson and Stephen E. Humphrey (2006), “The Work Design Questionnaire: Developing and Validating a Comprehensive Measure for Assessing Job Design and the Nature of Work”, Journal of Applied Psychology.