Describe how organizational roles impact employee stress levels and job performance.
What will be an ideal response?
Roles are the behaviors that are expected of a person in a particular organizational
context. People learn their roles in organizations and “act” them out daily. Roles can be
a source of stress in a number of ways because they place demands on a person to
fulfill expectations. Role ambiguity occurs where there is a lack of specificity or
predictability about what a person’s role is. In short, the person does not know what is
expected, which may be due to not understanding what a boss requires, for example.
Role conflict occurs when there are incompatible demands regarding what a person’s
role is. For example, a person’s boss may want an employee to work late, but their
coworkers want them to leave when they do so they don’t look bad (intersender role
conflict). Role conflict may also happen when organizational requirements conflict with
personal values (person–role conflict). Interrole conflict occurs when a person holds
multiple roles at the same time and feels torn by the demands of different role senders.
For example, a student wants to please the professor by studying for a midterm exam
but friends want to go out to dinner with them the night before the exam. Role overload
is a third form of role-related stress and it is caused by too much work, time pressure,
and deadlines that a person feels unable to meet. Role overload may be quantitative
(the number of demands) or qualitative, which refers to an employee not having the
qualifications to perform their work role. A study of 210 managers found that reducing all
three forms of role stress (role ambiguity, role conflict, and role overload) and social
support play a crucial role in increasing job satisfaction. Role stress may also cause
employees to act out at work. For example, a study of sales and service representatives
found that role conflict had a positive relationship with both organizational deviance
(e.g., taking property from work). Role ambiguity was positively, while role overload was
negatively, related to organizational deviance, respectively. Role stress also affects job
performance. A study of 227 hotel employees in Turkey found that role ambiguity and
role conflict are negatively associated with job performance; however, role overload is
positively associated with job performance. The effects of role stress can “add up” to
produce higher stress. In other words, role conflict, ambiguity, and overload produce
higher levels of stress when they are combined.
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