The Job‐Related Consequences of Different Types of Role Stress
| Date | 01 March 1978 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb055366 |
| Published date | 01 March 1978 |
| Pages | 41-44 |
| Author | A. Keenan,G.D.M. McBain |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
The Job-Related Consequences of
Different Types of Role Stress
A. Keenan
Department
of Business
Organisation,
Heriot-Watt
University
G. D. M. McBain
Department
of
Business
Organisation,
Heriot-Watt
University
Introduction
In recent years there has been an increasing realisation that
managers often experience considerable stress in their
working environment and that this can have a variety of
effects on their well-being. In particular, following early
work by Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, Snock and Rosenthal,[1]
a great deal of attention has been given to the concept of
role stress. Several different kinds of role stress have been
conceptualised by workers in this field.
Role ambiguity occurs when an individual has insufficiently
clear information about what is expected of him in his job.
For example, he may be unclear about the nature and scope
of his responsibilities in his job or about what he must do in
order to gain the approval of superiors.
In the case of role conflict, the information the individual
receives is clear enough, the problem is that it is conflicting.
Thus the demands placed on a manager by one person may
be incompatible with those placed by another. Other types
of role conflict include disparities between the individual's
personal values and required behaviour on the job. A
number of studies have reported that both ambiguity and
conflict are associated with high levels of job-related
tension and with low job satisfaction.[2]
Quantitative role overload occurs when a person is placed
in a situation where the total amount of work to be done is
too great for him to cope with in the time available. Much
of the work on role overload has been concerned with
possible health hazards of role overload, and a number of
workers have reported correlations between role overload
and psychological variables which are believed to be
connected with coronary heart disease.[3] French and
Caplan[4] have also described a condition known as
qualitative role overload, which they see as conceptually
distinct from quantitative overload. In this case, the
individual feels he does not have the skills and abilities to
carry out his job, irrespective of the time available to him.
However, little research has been carried out into
qualitative overload as a separate variable from quantitative
overload.
Ambiguity, conflict and overload all seem to be detrimental
to the individual in one way or another. However, this does
not necessarily mean that each has exactly the same
psychological effects. They may each generate their own
particular kind of stressful outcome and may therefore
require different remedies if their adverse effects are to be
minimised. For example, ambiguity might primarily affect
job satisfaction, and role overload mainly cause feelings of
tension at work. The present study made a direct
comparison of the effects of role ambiguity, role conflict,
quantitative role overload, and qualitative role overload on
a series of work-related outcomes.
Job satisfaction was one of the outcomes looked at, as were
experienced tension at work and worry about work
problems in general when away from work. Since a basic
feature of role stress is that it is likely to make the job of
the individual concerned more difficult, it seemed that one
consequence of high stress levels might be an increase in
the individual's anxiety about his own job performance
and career prospects. As a job becomes more difficult to
cope with, so it might tend to intrude more into the
individual's non-working life and this was also measured.
Finally, in view of the alleged relationship between role
overload and health, self-assessed physical health was also
measured in relation to role stress.
Method
Subjects and procedure
There were 90 managers in the sample. All were
administrators in a large public organisation. They could
be broadly described as middle managers. They were
mostly at similar levels in the organisational hierarchy
although their job descriptions varied somewhat. Seventy
per cent of the subjects were aged between 30-45, with a
median age of 37 years. Only one subject was less than
30 years old. There were only 11 females in the sample,
and consequently they were not treated separately in the
data analysis.
Questionnaires were administered in a single group session,
during an in-service management development course for
middle managers.
Measures
1 Role stress measures. Rizzo et al.[5] have developed
scales to measure role ambiguity and role conflict and
these, suitably anglicised, were used in the present study.
There were six role-ambiguity items and eight conflict
items,
and in every case the respondent had to indicate
how true each item was for him on a five-point scale.
Role overload was measured using items especially
constructed for this study, and again each item was
answered on a five-point scale. Quantitative overload was
the total score obtained from adding up responses to each
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