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

Promoting Health in the Microsystem 269
I prefer the term “career paths” over “career ladders” because the latter
implies an expectation that one must move upward in an organization.
A career path, which may move up, down, and laterally through an
organization, may better meet the needs of many employees and organizations.
The career path concept recognizes that the developmental
needs of both the employee and the organization change over time, and
it allows both to renegotiate their relationship depending on those
changes.
Role-person mismatch can also reflect broader organizational problems.
Closed systems encounter mismatch problems because their isolation
produces a progressively depleted pool of available job applicants.
Porous systems have a limitless pool of candidates, but their poor role
definitions and poor gatekeeping tend to bring in many unsuitable
individuals.
14.5 Strategies to Address Role Conflict
Role-conflict problems grow out of incongruous demands from simultaneously
held roles.
Strategies to address role conflict must start with an acknowledgment
that some degree of conflict probably is inevitable in both simple and
complex organizations. Eliminating role conflict for all members of an organization
is impossible. Given this, the management goal is to reduce the
incidence and intensity of those role conflicts most detrimental to individual
and organizational health. Such strategies include the following.
Identifying Role Conflict at an Early Stage. It is crucial that managers
watch for early signs of role conflict when an organization is founded,
when new units are added or deleted, and when internal roles are realigned.
Signs that may indicate role conflict include worker statements
indicating contradictory demands, supervisors competing for access to a
worker’s time and skills, worker confusion over role priorities, interpersonal
conflict (that on the surface may appear to be personality clashes
but may be problems in the organization of role expectations), the failure
to complete key tasks because of excessive demands spawned by
multiple, conflicting roles, a consistent pattern of distress exhibited by
people asked to perform a particular role, and a high incidence of
turnover in a role.
Defining Sources of Accountability. Where sources of accountability are
undefined or vaguely defined, a worker becomes vulnerable to multiple