Responsibility

Responsibility is the liability of a person to be called to account for his or her actions. It expresses the obligation a person has to fulfil a given task. A person is said to be responsible for a piece of work when he or she is required to ensure that the work is done.

Note that responsibility cannot be delegated to others.

If a manager is responsible for a given task, he may choose to delegate it to a member of his team. If they fail to perform the task in a satisfactory way, the manager is still responsible (or accountable) for this failure. This is because it was the manager's choice to delegate the task as well as the manager's failure to ensure that it was accomplished in a satisfactory way.