In Zurich, is role clarity enough when priorities conflict?
In financial services, insurance, tech and the European headquarters of international groups in Zurich, an employee may receive requests from several managers. The useful question is specific: is clarifying that employee’s role enough to reduce difficulties, or must someone also be explicitly responsible for resolving conflicting priorities?
What the literature establishes
John R. Rizzo, Robert J. House and Sidney I. Lirtzman (1970, Administrative Science Quarterly) distinguish role ambiguity from role conflict and propose instruments to measure them. The former concerns a lack of clarity about expectations, responsibilities or authority; the latter concerns incompatible demands. For a frontline manager, this distinction helps avoid offering another explanation when the problem requires a decision between competing demands.
Two difficulties, not necessarily the same remedy
Susan E. Jackson and Randall S. Schuler (1985, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) synthesise research on these two dimensions and examine their relationships with job characteristics and employee responses. Their meta-analysis identifies, among other findings, associations with lower job satisfaction, without establishing that the same intervention would address both problems. Knowing exactly what two managers want does not resolve the incompatibility of their deadlines.
The premature conclusion
It would be tempting to conclude that a more detailed job description is enough to improve the situation. It may make responsibilities clearer without giving the employee the authority to choose between two legitimate requests. The managerial response is then less about adding instructions than about making decision-making authority and the escalation route explicit. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence and current practice cannot establish
These studies do not constitute an intervention trial with Zurich teams, and a substantial share of the evidence reviewed relies on questionnaires and cross-sectional associations. They therefore do not justify a promise that clarifying roles will, on its own, improve performance. In practice, a responsibility matrix may also have little effect if the designated manager lacks either the authority or the availability to resolve competing demands.
A practical check in Zurich
Within SHR — Swiss Human Resources’ « Management de proximité » programme, one possible exercise is to keep an anonymised log of incompatible requests in a Zurich team for two weeks, excluding client data and sensitive information. For each case, record the competing requests, the person authorised to decide, the reporting date and the decision date; then measure the proportion of cases still open at the end of the period and the resolution time for closed cases. After making the escalation route explicit, repeat the exercise over an equally long period, using the same definition of a case. An improvement would not prove causation, but it would provide a more useful check than simply confirming that job descriptions have been read. To go further: explore the Frontline Management training in Zurich in the canton of Zurich, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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