By Hank Marquis

Unlock the power of Role Ambiguity and Conflict in Your IT Organization

Image Credit: pexels.com/@energepic-com-27411

Facing turnover, retention, and IT staff engagement problems? You could be struggling with Role Ambiguity or Role Conflict in your IT organization! Don't worry – you're not alone!

These two issues can cause significant stress and frustration, but there are ways to manage them. Role ambiguity and conflict affect many industries. However, in my experience, they seem rampant in the IT industry.

When you think about IT satisfaction, most leaders jump straight to technical operational "speeds and feeds", and hardware configurations. Some might think about the IT service desk. But role ambiguity and conflict are at all levels, disciplines, roles, and positions.

Role ambiguity arises from a lack of clear communication regarding the expected behaviors, activities, tasks, priorities, and performance levels by which management judges a role.

Role Ambiguity arises when IT staff face a request to do something that is not defined or not what's defined.

To adequately perform a function, a person must know the expectations of the position, what activities will fulfill their responsibilities (means-end knowledge), and the consequences of role performance.

Role conflict, on the other hand, arises when IT staff try to meet the demands of multiple and often incompatible customers or co-workers.

Role conflict occurs when a person is assigned simultaneous roles with conflicting expectations.

For example, meet Jules, an IT worker expected to focus on service financials but also expected by business customers to be a single point of contact for outages. What is Jules to do in this situation? What's "right"? Should Jules do what the customer wants or what management says?

Most workers facing such a choice will do what they believe is in their immediate personal best interest—often not what is best for the organization, especially in an IT or professional services environment.

Resolving role conflict may be more complicated than resolving role ambiguity since "managerial intervention" can resolve role ambiguity, but role conflict can span corporate boundaries. For example, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) may have a different opinion about an IT worker's role than IT leadership. IT workers sense this during daily interactions with users, customers, and even other IT staff and management. Others who don't work with the CMO may not, though, leading to conflicts.

These IT delivery failures happen when IT leadership tells IT workers to do one thing but clearly emphasizes another thing as its "real" priority.

When this happens, IT satisfaction tumbles and takes along with it user dissatisfaction, external customer churn, and lack of profits. This problem isn't a failure of the IT worker or digital employees. Nor is it a marketing, sales, or other problem. The failure lies with IT leadership.

Following best practice, the team scheduled maintenance during what they believed was the lowest-demand window: early Sunday morning. That’s when they performed changes, updates, and system work.

For example, let's say that IT management prioritizes restoring service, which involves heavy interaction with more technical aspects of service delivery. However, service restoration is not what IT leadership says they want through communications (such as position descriptions and team meetings) and incentive programs (like bonus payments and other rewards), leading to role ambiguity.

Role ambiguity and conflict are totally under your control.

They result from internal IT organizational management issues and missing, unused, or misused human resource policies, such as job descriptions. Are yours up to date? Do they clearly and accurately describe what your IT workers do? Or are they out of date? Or worse, I've even heard senior IT managers disparage the usefulness and need for job descriptions! Most job descriptions I've seen didn't accurately represent the role. And I've never met someone who used a position description during management reviews!

Plainly stated, if the IT worker roles are ill-defined and not managed in ways that promote clarity, stability, and quality of work output, it makes sense that employees would feel stressed and fall back on what they know best.

The issue is not as simple as "IT workers want to be technical"—in many cases, they don't. Of course, some do, but most believe that it's in their best interest to "be more technical," not due to personal desire but rather due to IT employment realities.

Let's go back to our friend Jules, the IT worker. Jules' IT organization lives by "firefighting"—reactively resolving service issues. Thus, Jules primarily faces two competing and incompatible demands from management:

1. Ensure the swift resolution of outages and problems (even at any cost).
2. Become increasingly disengaged technically, focusing more on service costing and sales activities.

Role ambiguity is common in IT organizations of all sizes.

One solution is establishing well-documented and enforced codes of conduct or job descriptions that minimize ambiguity. If your IT engagement is low, your IT satisfaction from customers (function heads like SVP Sales) and users (those working in Sales in this example) is probably low. External customer loyalty tracks with user engagement, which ties directly to IT worker disposition, itself a direct consequence of IT leadership!

Do you need to re-develop your IT roles, communicate them properly to managers and use them in 1:1's and ongoing IT employee development? Got questions? Ask me how!

Please comment or reach out and let me know what you think, I'd love to talk with you!

Best,
Hank

— END —