Responsibility vs. Accountability
Dictionary Definitions
If you look up the dictionary definitions of responsibility and accountability, you'll see they overlap. Here are composites of what some of the leading dictionaries will give you.
- RESPONSIBILITY
Having a duty to deal with something; being accountable or to blame for something; being answerable or accountable for something within one's control; moral or mental accountability.
- ACCOUNTABILITY
The fact of being responsible for what you do and able to give a satisfactory reason for it, or the degree to which this happens; an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions.
Not very useful in distinguishing one from the other, since they reference each other, right? Let's try looking at the root of the words:
- RESPONSE
An answer, offered in return to a question; something constituting a reply or a reaction.
- ACCOUNT
A description of events or situations; an explanatory statement of reasons, causes, or motives; a record of financial transactions and the resulting balance; a record of financial expenditure and receipts.
Now we see more of a distinction. Response forms the core of responsibility, and that means answering to whoever assigned your responsibility as to whether a task was done, what additional resources are needed, or whether it was your failure that it didn't get done. And then, of course, it implies performing the tasks one must answer for.
But then note that account has multiple meanings, restated here in relation to business management:
- An explanation of causes; the story leading up to an event or condition.
- Financial records
You'll see in the next section that the business management cognoscenti all take the first definition of account when describing accountability in a business environment, which makes it about the same as response. They then valiantly try to create a separate useful concept. All these creative efforts failed, as we'll now describe.
Responsibility vs. Accountability
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