When Can One Be Held Accountable?

What does it mean to be accountable and how can you hold somebody accountable? And what is the difference between being accountable and being responsible? Are those concepts synonymous?

A friend of mine, Peter Schultz, the former CEO of Porsche car company, said that civilization started with the discovering of God. It  made us accountable. If you sin, you go to hell; perform good deeds, you go to heaven. To be accountable means, then, that you can be rewarded or punished for your deeds. 
            
Is defining the deeds, for which apparently we are responsible to carry out, enough to make us accountable as well? 
  
Responsibility and accountability  are not synonymous words. Responsibility is what the organization expects from you. Accountability is what you expect from yourself. To feel accountable you must know what you are responsible for. You have to know what is expected from you, what you are held responsible for. And the boundaries should be clearly defined. You are responsible for this. You are not responsible for that. But that is not enough. 
            
The second component necessary for feeling  accountable is: Can you do it? Do you have sufficient authority and/or power and/or influence to carry out your responsibility? Sometimes you might not have the authority necessary to carry out your responsibility, but you have influence. You are able to explain the situation and mobilize  people with the knowledge you have on the case. Maybe you have some power, too, which means: “If you cooperate with me, I’ll cooperate with you.” 

You will start feeling  accountable when you know what you‘re responsible for and you have the organizational authority — and/or power, and/or influence — to carry it through. But to really feel accountable  You should also have a reason to do it. You must feel rewarded for your efforts, extrinsically and /or intrinsically.  If you are repetitively under-rewarded, or under-recognized for what you are accomplishing in carrying out your responsibility,  obviously you will not feel motivated and  over time  you will  not feel accountable.

I suggest that a person will feel accountable for a responsibility when  responsibility, authority — power and influence, which is the capability — and the reward subsystems are aligned, more or less. 

It has to be more or less because of change. The task is more or less because no responsibility  can be defined to the finest detail. And because the task you are being held responsible for is not hundred percent defined, you cannot define exactly what the authority is either. And the power structure changes when new people come to the company, or when old-timers leave. Influence changes as technologies and knowledge change. And the rewards are fluid as well. As the economic conditions change, the buying power changes. As the composition of the people and their positions in the company change, so does recognition as a reward system. 

If management or leadership wants and needs to hold people accountable for what they are being held responsible for, if it wants to be able to predict if people will be delivering what they are being held responsible for, it needs to continuously realign the responsibility , the authority and the reward subsystems in the process of adapting to change.