In Fribourg, when a task feels outside one's professional role
In food production, bilingual industry and teams within Fribourg's university sector, flexible working arrangements can mean assigning tasks far removed from someone's original profession. The managerial question is specific: how can a necessary contribution to collective work be distinguished from an assignment experienced as professional devaluation?
What the literature establishes
Norbert K. Semmer, Nicola Jacobshagen, Laurenz L. Meier, Achim Elfering, Terry A. Beehr, Wolfgang Kälin and Franziska Tschan (2015, Work & Stress) examine “illegitimate tasks”: tasks perceived as unnecessary or unreasonable to assign to someone given their role. Their findings associate these tasks with indicators of psychological strain and resentment towards the organisation. The issue is therefore not merely the amount of work, but also the perceived legitimacy of its allocation.
The mechanism: what an assignment says about a profession
The proposed mechanism involves a threat to professional identity: an assignment can be interpreted as signalling that a person's skills or role are not respected. In a bilingual industrial team, routinely asking a specialist to translate documents without acknowledging that function could therefore be experienced differently from occasional mutual assistance. This is a hypothesis to explore with the team, not a diagnosis attached to translation.
The premature conclusion
It would be premature to conclude that all peripheral tasks should be removed or that work must remain strictly within job descriptions. The same task can seem legitimate when it meets an explicitly stated need, yet feel inappropriate when assigned without justification. An activity's low status does not in itself establish its illegitimacy, just as an explanation does not make a persistently unbalanced allocation acceptable. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot establish
Ashley E. Nixon, Joseph J. Mazzola, Jeremy Bauer, Jeremy R. Krueger and Paul E. Spector (2011, Work & Stress) synthesise associations between several occupational stressors and physical symptoms, without isolating illegitimate tasks as a specific category. Their meta-analysis therefore cannot attribute a symptom to a task considered inappropriate, and observed associations do not, by themselves, establish causality. In practice, neither an individual complaint nor the absence of complaints can replace an examination of the tasks actually assigned and their context.
A practical check in Fribourg
As part of SHR's “Psychosocial Risks” programme, one proposed exercise is to record, over two weeks, assignments considered unnecessary or outside the person's role in a Fribourg food-production, bilingual industrial or university team, noting their rationale and frequency. The manager then reviews each situation with the people concerned and records a decision: remove, simplify, reassign or retain with justification, making that justification accessible in the team's working languages. The verifiable measure is the proportion of reviewed situations with a documented decision, followed one month later by a check on implementation; it measures the organisation's response to the problem, not a demonstrated health effect. To go further: explore the Psychosocial Risks training in Fribourg in the canton of Fribourg, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Psychosocial Risks in Fribourg
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