Psychosocial risks in the canton of Genève: who resolves conflicting instructions?
Genève brings together international organisations, private banks, commodity trading houses and watch brands within a small area, with highly multicultural teams working in both French and English. For SHR’s “Psychosocial Risks” programme, this raises a precise management question: when an employee receives two incompatible requests, do they know who can decide which takes priority?
What the literature establishes
John R. Rizzo, Robert J. House and Sidney I. Lirtzman (1970, Administrative Science Quarterly) distinguish and measure two dimensions: role ambiguity and role conflict. The former concerns uncertainty about expectations, responsibilities or authority; the latter concerns expectations that are difficult to reconcile. This distinction prevents every coordination difficulty from being treated as a simple lack of information.
When clarifying expectations is not enough
Susan E. Jackson and Randall S. Schuler (1985, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) synthesise research on these two dimensions and their relationships with work characteristics, affective reactions and behaviour. Their meta-analysis documents associations with lower job satisfaction and greater tension, among other findings. The mechanism to examine is therefore also organisational: someone may fully understand two requests without having the authority needed to reconcile them.
The premature conclusion
It would be tempting to conclude that a better job description or systematic translation would be enough to prevent the problem. In a private bank in Genève, a hypothetical example would be an urgent commercial request incompatible with an announced review timeframe: rephrasing both instructions does not determine their priority. Bilingual working is not a demonstrated cause of risk here; it calls for checking that both languages convey the same decision and the same authority to resolve conflicts. (our executive and employee training programmes)
The limits of the evidence and of procedures
These studies are neither research specific to the canton of Genève nor proof that clarifying roles alone prevents health problems. Much of the evidence synthesised relies on questionnaires and associations, which allow only limited causal interpretation. In practice, an organisational chart may name a responsible manager without establishing whether that person is available, authorised to decide and actually listened to.
A practical check in Genève
As part of the “Psychosocial Risks” programme, a team in Genève could test an anonymised log of incompatible instructions for two weeks, excluding client data and sensitive case information. In hypothetical situations — review requirements versus commercial urgency in private banking, headquarters versus programme requests in an international organisation, quality versus delivery in luxury watchmaking, compliance versus execution in commodity trading — each entry would record the requests, the designated decision-maker and the decision communicated in the necessary working language or languages. The measure would be the proportion of logged situations receiving an explicit decision communicated to those involved before the relevant deadline; unresolved cases would be examined as organisational problems, not as individual failures to withstand stress. To go further: explore the Psychosocial Risks training in Geneva in the canton of Geneva, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Psychosocial Risks in Geneva
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