In Sion, who resolves conflicting instructions?
In hydropower, healthcare, viticulture and Alpine tourism, several functions may legitimately have a say in the same activity. The management question is specific: when a team receives incompatible instructions, can it obtain a decision, or must it shoulder the contradiction alone?
What the literature establishes
John R. Rizzo, Robert J. House and Sidney I. Lirtzman (1970, Administrative Science Quarterly) distinguish role conflict, involving incompatible expectations, from role ambiguity, involving a lack of clarity about expectations and responsibilities. Their work proposes instruments for measuring these dimensions and examines their relationships with organisational and individual variables. This distinction prevents every coordination difficulty from being treated as a mere information deficit.
Two problems requiring different responses
Susan E. Jackson and Randall S. Schuler (1985, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) synthesise research on these two dimensions and their relationships with job characteristics, affective reactions and behaviours. Their meta-analysis identifies associations with lower job satisfaction and greater tension, among other findings. In management terms, clarifying a poorly understood expectation and deciding between two incompatible expectations are therefore distinct interventions.
The premature conclusion
It might seem that a more detailed job description is enough to prevent this risk. It may reduce some uncertainties without resolving a disagreement between two managers who each maintain their request. The aim is not to eliminate all competing expectations, but to prevent the person doing the work from being left to bear their incompatibility. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
The associations reviewed do not demonstrate that a decision-making procedure will, by itself, improve health. A substantial part of this literature relies on questionnaires and correlational designs, which limit causal interpretation. Counting decisions therefore provides a way to examine organisational practice, not to diagnose a disorder or directly measure a reduction in psychosocial risks.
A practical check in Sion
As part of SHR’s “Psychosocial Risks” programme, a team in Sion could record situations in which two instructions cannot both be followed over a two-week period: hydropower maintenance, care coordination, vineyard work or tourist services, depending on its activity. For each situation, it would record the function asked to decide, the decision and the response time, without personal data and without suspending emergency or safety procedures. After explicitly designating a decision-making function and a backup, it would repeat the exercise over two comparable weeks and calculate the proportion of situations in which a decision was available before the task concerned was carried out. Reporting the situation counts and response times as well would help establish whether decisions are genuinely becoming accessible, without mistaking that result for evidence of improved health. To go further: explore the Psychosocial Risks training in Sion in the canton of Valais, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Psychosocial Risks in Sion
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