Relationship between Work-family Balance, Role ambiguity, Autonomy and Job Stress and its impact on Employee Performance in Indian IT Context
Relationship between Work-family Balance, Role ambiguity, Autonomy and Job Stress and its impact on Employee Performance in Indian IT Context
Musheer Ahmad, Vivian Emmanuel, Niharika Jain, Vikrant Chaplot, XLRI- Jamshedpur
KEYWORDS Work-family balance
Role conflict / ambiguity
Job Stress Employee Performance
ABSTRACT
Studies pertaining to increasing impact of job stress in India reveal that there are some factors that have a major impact on both triggering and relieving job stress. Our present research studies the impact of role conflict / ambiguity in triggering job stress and workfamily balance in relieving job stress. The resulting impact of job stress on employee performance is studied with job stress acting as mediating variable between role ambiguity and employee performance. We have introduced autonomy as situational moderator between role ambiguity and job stress. Data collected from 156 IT professionals was subjected to mediation analysis. The results established that role ambiguity is statistically significant predictor of employee performance and that job stress is an important mediator in transmitting the effect of the independent variables to the dependent variables. Whereas job stress does not acts as a mediator for work-family balance and employee performance. However, we have found that work-family balance directly influences employee performance. Also we have found out significance of autonomy as a moderator between role ambiguity and job stress.
RESEARCH PAPER
1.0 INTRODUCTION
The impact of Western culture in India has given rise to a mixed culture where the Indian value and family systems meet the modern working conditions. The Indian employee has to balance between his work and family life. We started with the premise that: if a person is not able to maintain work-family balance then it might result in undue job stress that is detrimental to effective functioning of employee in both family and work life. Jackson and Maslach( 1982) studied this growing trend and found that in addition to the symptoms felt by the employee himself, the family suffers. Apart from being less involved with colleagues, the stressed employee is also less involved with family and tends to spend his non-work time away from home. On the other hand, an employee who is able to manage his work and family would be able to perform relatively well. The increasing work and family problems today, arise from the lack of a work-family balance and extreme orientation towards the materialistic culture. The research intends to determine the effect of Work-family Balance on Job Stress and Employee Performance. But it was found in the course of research that though workfamily balance impacts employee performance but its mediation through job stress was not significant.
Another aspect in Indian Organization today is a plethora of roles that an employee is expected to play which in turn is dynamic in nature causing increasing conflict and ambiguity in different roles. The inter-role ambiguity / conflict often results as individuals find it more and more difficult to successfully complete duties of each of their roles because of limited resources or the incompatibility among different roles( Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, Snoek, & Rosenthal, 1964). The conflicts and ambiguity in turn leads to uncertainty and Job Stress that are not creative in nature leading to Employee Performance problems.
This research aims to empirically examine these theoretical premises in the context of Indian Organizations. The rest of the report is organized as follows: the next section reviews the literature and generates a number of hypotheses on the relationship between the constructs studied. The third section describes the methodology used in the study and the fourth section presents the results of the analysis. The discussion and conclusion are presented in the fifth section.
2.0 LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESIS GENERATION
Job stress happens when requirements exceed capabilities, while work-related strains are results or implications from the stress( Westman, 2005). A major outcome of role theory is that simultaneously doing multiple roles is likely to be associated with increased stress and hence strain. In the recent years stress is coming forth as a major problem in the organization. Stress is a state of mental, physical or emotional strain. Selye( 1936) first initiated the concept of stress as the tension experienced by a body on application of force or
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