Frontline Management training in LucerneFrontline management in the canton of Lucerne: who resolves conflicting instructions?
In the canton of Lucerne, tourism, hospitality, regional financial services and industrial SMEs include many family-run businesses with short decision-making channels and strong regional ties. For SHR’s “Management de proximité” programme, this context raises a specific question: how can managers prevent employees from having to resolve competing demands from their immediate supervisor and senior management on their own?
1. What the literature distinguishes
John R. Rizzo, Robert J. House and Sidney I. Lirtzman (1970, Administrative Science Quarterly) distinguish role conflict from role ambiguity. The former concerns incompatible expectations; the latter involves insufficient clarity about expectations, responsibilities or authority. This distinction matters: clarifying an instruction does not necessarily resolve its contradiction with another.
2. Associations that extend beyond performance
Susan E. Jackson and Randall S. Schuler (1985, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) synthesise research on these two dimensions and their relationships with various job characteristics and employee responses. Their analysis links both role ambiguity and role conflict to lower job satisfaction, among other findings. It nevertheless calls for distinguishing the outcomes examined rather than assuming a uniform effect across all aspects of performance.
3. The premature conclusion: formalise everything
One might conclude that detailed job descriptions and procedures are all that is needed. Yet two entirely explicit requests can remain incompatible: in a hypothetical Lucerne hotel, accepting an early arrival while keeping the room preparation schedule unchanged and providing no additional resources. The manager’s task is then to secure a decision on priorities, not merely to explain the tasks more clearly. (our executive and employee training programmes)
4. What the evidence cannot establish
These studies do not investigate businesses in the canton of Lucerne, and the observed associations are insufficient to establish causality. Reported perceptions may also reflect broader dissatisfaction or shared organisational constraints. In a family-run business, proximity to senior management may facilitate decisions or multiply direct requests: the local context alone cannot determine which occurs.
5. A practical check in Lucerne
As an application exercise for the “Management de proximité” programme, a manager at a hotel in Lucerne could trial a log of conflicting instructions for one month, without recording personal data. For each case, the manager would record the two expectations, the person authorised to resolve the conflict, the decision and the time taken to resolve it. The measure would be the proportion of cases receiving an explicit decision before execution, alongside the total number of cases recorded. This hypothetical example makes it possible to check whether priority decisions become visible, without claiming to demonstrate improved satisfaction or performance. To go further: explore the Frontline Management training in Lucerne in the canton of Lucerne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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