putting formal mechanisms in place and removing barriers won ' t necessarily make employees feel safe enough to offer ideas for improving products, processes or performance. Instead, to get employees to offer ideas for improvement, that company( and many other organizations) would have to develop significant cultural changes to reduce the fear in the workplace, decrease job stress and increase fun in workplace.
This research, have tried to relate the constructs of role ambiguity, work life balance and stress to job performance. Job performance has been defined as the productivity level of an individual employee when compared to peers, on different job-related behaviors and outcomes( Babin & Boles, 1998, p. 82). Two other factors related to employee performance are in-role and extra-role( Brief & Motowidlo, 1986). Job performance is a generally used, yet even this concept is poorly defined. Performance is an important criterion which affects the organizational success. Autonomy is authority to carry out work freely and is linked to both objective and subjective performance ratings.
Autonomy has been shown to have a positive relation with work-life balance. It has been shown that people with more amount of autonomy at the work-place reported far less imbalance( David E. Guest, 2001). Interestingly, other factors like family-friendly features at the work-place had a far less impact on work-life balance than autonomy did. Creating a fair amount of autonomy for every level is now gaining ground and is used by modern HR practitioners. It has been shown that Autonomy is not just directly, but also indirectly linked with Work-Life balance through the variable Job- Satisfaction. However, the flip side to this, according to some of the work of Hochschild( 1997) is the possibility that the use of progressive human resource practices as this one, can risk making work almost too attractive.
Autonomy has also been linked to job-stress. However, this relation is negatively correlated. Higher the autonomy, lower the job-stress. When studying the effect of Job Stressors( constraints, conflict and justice) on the phenomenon of Counterproductive Work Behavior( CWB)( Fox, Spector and Miles, 2001) taking autonomy as one of the moderator variables between stressors and CWB, the value of alpha obtained, after repeated tests, corrected to approximately p <. 01.
Autonomy can be linked to Employee Performance as well via job empowerment. The more the autonomy the more the employees are empowered to make decisions independently and take the reins in their own hands and more often than not, it leads to higher productivity.( Light, 2004)
The three hypotheses for study shown schematically in the path model shown in Figure 1 are:
H1: Work-family Balance has a significant negative influence on Job Stress i. e. more the work-family balance, lesser the impact of job stress.
H2: Role conflict / ambiguity has a significant positive influence on Job Stress i. e. more the role conflict / ambiguity, the more the job stress.
H3: Job Stress has a significant negative influence on Employee Performance i. e. more the job stress, lesser the employee performance.
H4: Autonomy is a situational moderator for role ambiguity and Job Stress i. e. if Autonomy is higher Role Ambiguity is not mediated by Job Stress.
3.0 METHODOLOGY 3.1 Sample
For the study, 156 IT professionals from different organizations were surveyed. The survey consisted of 33 questions related to the variables under consideration measured on a 5 point unforced and balanced Likert scale. The reason for study was disclosed to the participants but no additional information was given on the questionnaire or otherwise that would possibly bias the responses.
Demographics of the respondents
1. All the respondents were married and had atleast 10 months of relevant work experience
2. The average age of respondents was around 27 years.
3. The average work experience of respondents was around 46 months.
For a comprehensive summary on the respondents to the questionnaire, refer to Exhibit 1 to Exhibit 4.
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