Fundamentally, rules almost always come with compromises — for the sake of making rules understandable by humans, they have to be relatively simple. Simple rules for complex situations will always forbid some amount of good behaviour, and allow some bad behaviour. Many of society's parasites live in the space of "allowable bad behaviour", but there is a lot of value to knowing how to exploit the "forbidden good behaviour" space.

Here's the dangerous way I put it that I only tell senior people: understand why rules were made and make sure the people who made them would be happy.

As a supervisor I didn’t resonate with this until I remembered in some jobs I have communicated the company attendance policy but didn’t enforce it unless someone was a poor performer. I trust adults to manage their own time until they give me a reason to believe otherwise.

For my part, I’d rather trust people’s judgment and intrinsic motivation than enforce the rules. Enforcement is annoying, tedious, and distracting to my mission. However once I decide their judgement can’t be trusted I use rules to extrinsically motivate them.

A more palatable phrasing, "supervisors prefer people that engage with the rules with purpose." That is, choosing to break a rule because you are making a cost call based on what you were able to achieve is not, necessarily, a bad thing.

The "point" where this fails, of course, is where the "cost" call above is such that the supervisor can't agree.

> “Rule breaking appears to signal a team member’s commitment—a willingness to do whatever it takes to get the job done,” wrote Wakeman, Yang, and Moore, all of whom are hockey fans.

Beyond "taking one for the team", in business, I didn't see the article make some key distinctions:

* What is the origin of the rules? (Originated in the interests of the organization, or came from outside, such as regulatory requirements.)

* How much does the organization care about the rules? (Some rules they just need to make a paper trail show of effort, and worst impact is a transactional cost-of-business fine, or an unflattering news cycle. Other rule violations could dethrone a CEO, or even send them to prison.)

* Would the organization actually love to get away with violating that rule, when the right individual comes along to execute it without getting caught? (Say, some very lucrative financial scheme that's disallowed by regulations.)

* How aligned is the manager with the organization wrt the rules in question? (Say, the company actually really doesn't want people to violate this one rule, but a manager gets bonuses and promotions when their reports have the advantage of breaking the rule.)

Depending on those answers, a manager's claim of "Doing what it takes to get the job done!" can sound very different.