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

Promoting Health in the Microsystem 267
to current organizational members at the same level. If there are serious
problems of staff conflict, communicate their nature and intensity. If
there are particular stressors unique to the role the applicant is seeking,
communicate them clearly and completely. If a manager/interviewer has
done an effective job, a new employee should enter an organization
without illusions, and find exactly in the work environment both the
demands and rewards he or she had been led to expect.
With some positions, it may be helpful to offer a selected candidate
an opportunity to spend a half or full day at a job site before making his
or her final decision to accept or decline the position. This allows a
prospective employee to sense how he or she would feel in the physical
and social environments and the realistic parameters of the role he or she
would be assuming.
Permission for Early Exit. Even in the best of circumstances, both a
manager and an applicant may overestimate the applicant’s ability to
manage the technical and emotional demands of a position. This shared
error in judgment may be difficult to confront by both parties and, unfortunately,
is usually addressed long after the traditional probation period
ends. The keys to solving this dilemma are for the supervisor to rule
out that performance problems are due to environmental factors over
which the employee has no control and to provide training to upgrade
skills and role performance. If these are done and the employee still is
not a good fit, the supervisor must confront the misplacement firmly and
directly and try to provide the worker with permission for an early and
guilt-free exit from the role or the organization. Providing support for
and supervision of a supervisor going through this situation will significantly
increase his or her willingness to proceed; it is one of the most
stressful situations a supervisor can face.
Avoiding Misplacement through Promotion. A type of role-person mismatch
can occur not with a new employee, but with a lateral or upward
movement of an existing employee in the organizational structure. In
these cases, one discovers the erroneousness of the assumption that exemplary
performance in one role can be used to predict successful performance
in a different role. The usual scenario is that someone who has
demonstrated outstanding knowledge and skills in one role is promoted
to a role with different skill and adaptational demands. This type of
misplacement creates a double loss. First, the organization has lost the