Incest 0000i-xiv FM 1 - William L. White

Role Conditi0ns and the Worker Casualty Process 161
tions. Most commentators agree that Jackie Robinson was the perfect
choice to break the color barrier in professional baseball. He was the
perfect choice not simply because of his extraordinary skills as a baseball
player, but because his level of distress tolerance and style of handling
distress sustained him and prevented his self-destruction when
confronted with some of the most shameful examples of racism in the
history of professional sports. There must be a reasonable fit between
our level of distress tolerance and our style of handling distress and the
organizational milieu. The fit, or chemistry, between the individual and
the organization is an inherent part of the stories of both superperformers
and casualties.
10.3 Role-Assignment Misplacement
Role assignment misplacement is the movement of a person
with excellent skills in an interior organizational position to a
boundary position in the organization, or vice versa.
Workers who hold interior positions in an organization interact primarily
with other members of their teams, units, or departments. Workers in
boundary positions interact frequently with other microsystems in the
organization and/or have multiple transactions with systems outside the
organization.
Role-assignment misplacement constitutes a special type of roleperson
mismatch. The mismatch often occurs when organizations reward
successful performance in an interior role by promoting a worker
to a boundary position, assuming the knowledge and skills are transferable.
The fact is that boundary roles usually require significantly different
skills than interior roles, and often require different levels of distress
tolerance and different styles of stress management.
For example, a hospital unit supervisor, who provided other unit personnel
with day-to-day leadership to ensure patient-care services, was
promoted to a department head. The new position required a great deal
of time interacting with other hospital departments and marketing department
services outside the hospital. Rather than focusing on patient
care, the new department head was thrown into a world of interdepartmental
politics, budget battles, hospital committees, and special task
forces to generate new money-making ideas to compensate for a decrease
in patient numbers. In short, the technical patient-care skills were not
applicable to the new role. The new role demanded areas of knowledge