Why Too Much Freedom at Work Can Backfire (and How to Make It Work for You)
- The Innovation Office
- Aug 12
- 2 min read
Giving people freedom to choose their own projects sounds like a dream recipe for creativity. But a new study by Jiho Yang, Paola Criscuolo and Dmitry Sharapov, published in Research Policy, shows there’s more to the story (read the paper).
The research looked at R&D teams in a large organisation and compared two scenarios:
Top-down projects where problems are assigned.
Autonomous projects where teams choose their own problems.
The twist? Teams with full strategic autonomy tended to define simpler problems, which in turn were linked to less creative inventions. This wasn’t because people were avoiding hard work - it’s that finding and framing a problem from scratch takes a lot of brainpower, and that can leave fewer resources for generating truly novel solutions.
Surprises in the data
One unexpected finding was that working on multiple projects at once could actually help autonomous teams. The authors suggest this might be because juggling projects gives teams a richer pool of ideas to draw from, helping them spot and frame problems more quickly.
They also found that experience matters. Teams with greater domain expertise could handle the demands of problem-finding and problem-framing better, avoiding the dip in creativity.
Why this matters for UK leaders
Whether you run a research group in a UK university, lead innovation in a membership organisation, or manage product teams in business, the message is clear: freedom is valuable, but it needs smart design.
Here are the study’s practical takeaways, re-imagined for real-world settings:
Be clear about the kind of autonomy you’re giving
Operational autonomy (how to solve a set problem) generally boosts creativity.
Strategic autonomy (choosing the problem) can work - but it demands more cognitive effort and benefits most from experienced hands.
Match freedom with experience
Give strategic autonomy mainly to people with proven expertise. They’re more likely to choose valuable, challenging problems that align with organisational goals.
Offer a curated menu of problems
Instead of “anything goes,” create a list of future-facing, strategically relevant problems. Let teams choose from these so their interests and the organisation’s priorities meet in the middle.
Encourage project overlap
The “multi-project” finding suggests cross-pollination of ideas matters. Allowing people to work on more than one project can actually improve problem-finding.
Leverage past work
Encourage teams to build on problems they’ve tackled before - this speeds up the search and frees more energy for solution-finding.
The bigger point
The paper challenges the “more autonomy is always better” narrative. For complex problem-solving, leaders may need to design the conditions under which autonomy happens - balancing motivation, cognitive load, and organisational relevance.
Full paper (open access): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733325001003