Psychosocial risks in the canton of Geneva: can employees flag conflicting instructions without putting themselves at risk?

Geneva brings together international organisations, private banks, commodity trading houses and watch brands within a small territory, with highly multicultural teams in which French and English coexist. For SHR's “Psychosocial risks” programme, this raises a precise management question: how can an organisation check that conflicting instructions can be reported and resolved, rather than endured in silence?

What the literature establishes

Amy Edmondson (1999, Administrative Science Quarterly) identifies an association between team psychological safety and learning behaviours, including discussing errors and seeking feedback. Psychological safety refers to a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, such as acknowledging a difficulty or asking for help. It means neither permanent comfort nor an absence of demands, and this study does not directly demonstrate a protective effect on mental health.

The mechanism of organisational silence

Elizabeth Wolfe Morrison and Frances J. Milliken (2000, Academy of Management Review) propose a theoretical model of organisational silence: certain management practices and beliefs can foster the view that speaking up is dangerous or pointless. This is a conceptual paper, not a survey measuring the frequency of silence in Geneva. It nevertheless helps distinguish two practical barriers: fearing a manager's reaction and believing that no decision will follow.

The overly quick conclusion

One might conclude that simply inviting everyone to speak up is enough to prevent psychosocial risks. Yet an invitation does not resolve a conflict between a commercial deadline and a mandatory check, and speaking up without receiving a response may leave the problem intact. In a Geneva private bank or commodity trading house, such a conflict would be a hypothetical example requiring a management decision, not a difficulty whose local prevalence these studies establish. (our executive and employee training programmes)

The limits of the evidence and of everyday practice

These papers illuminate the conditions for speaking up at work, but do not establish that an increase in reports reduces health problems. In a French- and English-speaking team, providing a form in both languages likewise does not guarantee that everyone understands “urgent”, “approval” or “priority” in the same way. A low number of reports remains ambiguous: it may reflect few conflicting instructions, but also a reporting channel that lacks credibility or is difficult to use.

A practical check in Genève

As an application exercise for the programme, a Geneva team could run a four-week trial of a restricted-access log of conflicting instructions, available in French and English and excluding client names and commercially sensitive information. For each case, it would record the conflicting instructions, the person responsible for resolving them, the response date and the decision communicated; hypothetical examples include competing approval requirements in an international organisation or tension between a deadline and quality control in luxury watchmaking. The measure would be the proportion of logged cases receiving an explicit decision communicated to the team, alongside a review of unresolved cases. This check would assess the handling of reported conflicts, not their actual frequency or a health effect, and would not replace a confidential channel for individual situations. 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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