Sample Case - 2

IOD - GMBA - April 2010 (Dubai)

Case Incident – Role Conflict among Telephone service employees

All supervisory jobs are not alike. Maggie is just learning this fact. After having spent 3 years as a production scheduling supervisor at P&G manufacturing plant, she recently took a position as manager of telephone services at Ohio Provident Insurance. In her new job, Maggie supervises 20 telephone service employees. These people have direct contact with customers – providing quotes, answering questions, following up on claims, and the like.

At P&G, Maggie’s employees knew they had only one constituency to please. That was management. But Maggie is finding that her employees at OPI have it more difficult. As service employees, they have to serve 2 masters – management and the customer. And at least from comments her employees have made, they seem to think there is discrepancy between what they believe customers want them to do and what they believe management wants them to do. A frequent complaint, for instance, is that customers want the telephone rep’s undivided attention and to spend as much time as necessary to solve their problem. But the reps see management as wanting them to handle as many calls as possible per day and to keep each call as short as possible.

This morning, a rep came into Maggie’s office, complaining of severe headaches. “The more I try to please our customers, the more stress I feel,” the rep told Maggie. “I want to do the best job I can for our customers, but I do not feel like I can devote the time that is necessary. You constantly remind us that it is the customer who provides our paychecks and how important it is to give reliable, courteous and responsive service, but then we feel the pressure to handle more calls per hour.”

Maggie is well aware of studies that have shown that role conflict is related to reduced job satisfaction, increased turnover and absenteeism, and fewer organizational citizenship behaviors. And severe role conflict is also likely to lead to poor customer service – the antithesis of her department’s goals.

After talking with her staff, Maggie concluded that regardless of whether their perceptions were accurate, her people certainly believed them to be. They were reading one set of expectations through their interactions with customers and another set through what the company conveyed during the selection process, in training sessions, and through the behaviors that management rewarded.

Questions

1. What is the source of role conflict here?

2. Are these functional benefits to management from role conflict? Explain.

3. Should role conflict among these telephone service employees be any greater than a typical employee who works as part of team and has to meet the expectations of a boss as well as team members? Explain.

4. What can Maggie do to manage this role conflict?