Empowerment as Predictor of Organizational Role

Stress among Bank and Insurance Personnel

Ajai Pratap Singh*

Abstract

This study examines the impact of empowerment on organisational role

stress. Based on a sample size of 120, the results depicted empowerment as

being negatively and significantly related with organisational role stress. The

findings have implications for managing and regulating organisational role

stress.

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*Senior Lecturer , Dept. of Applied Psychology, VBS Purvanchal University

Jaunpur,UP India Email- ajaisingh27@yahoo.com

Introduction

Modern life is full of stress. As organizations become more complex, the

potential for stress increases. Urbanization, industrialization and increase in

scale of operations are some of the reasons for rising stress. Stress is an

inevitable consequence of socioeconomic complexity and, to some extent, its

stimulant as well. People experience stress, as they can no longer have

complete control over what happens in their lives. Being no escape from

stress in modem life, we need to find ways of using stress productively, and

reducing dysfunctional stress. In recent years, the concept of empowerment

has become a buzzword in management circles and gained prominence as an

individual level initiative to counter stress. Its origins are in issues raised in

the era of employee involvement symbolized by participative management,

managerial practices such as employee self management, and sharing power

and responsibility with team members.

Employee Empowerment

One of the most frequently referenced definitions of employee

empowerment is that offered by Conger and Kanungo (1988). They define

empowerment as a process of enhancing feelings of self-efficacy among

organizational members through the identification of conditions that foster

powerlessness, and through their removal by both formal organizational

practices and informal techniques of proving efficacy information. This

definition implies strengthening the effort-to-performance expectancy or

increasing employee feeling of self-efficacy. According to Conger and

Kanungo, the effect of empowerment is the initiation and persistence of

behavior by empowered employees to accomplish task objectives. This

definition is rooted in management theory of power and authority delegation

that gives an employee the right to control and use organizational resources

to bring about desired organizational outcomes.

Thomas and Velthouse (1990), however, argued that the concept of

empowerment is much more complex and could not be fully explained in a

one dimensional construct such as self-efficacy. They therefore define

empowerment as an intrinsic task motivation that manifests itself in four

cognitions (meaningfulness, competence, impact and choice or self-

determination), reflecting an individual’s orientation to his or her work roles.

By intrinsic task motivation, they mean, a positively valued experiences that

an individual derives directly from a task that produces motivation and

satisfaction.

Meaningfulness is the value of the task goal or purpose in relation to the

individual’s own ideals or standards, and competence is the degree to which

a person can perform task activities skillfully. Impact, on the other hand, is

the degree to which behavior is seen as making a difference in terms of

accomplishing the purpose of the task, while choice or self-determination is

the causal responsibility for a person’s actions. It reflects independence in

the initiation and continuation of work behavior and processes (Deci,

Connell, and Ryan, 1989).

Employee empowerment literature identifies contextual factors and

strategies that promote and support empowerment. For example, Burke

(1986) suggests that a way to empower employees is to express confidence

in them together with establishing realistic high performance expectations

for them. Block (1987) adds the creation of opportunities for employees to

participate in decision making, and giving employees

autonomy from bureaucratic constraints as empowerment strategies.

Comparatively, Benis and Nanus (1985) suggest the setting of performance

objectives for employees that are challenging and inspiring. Also, Oldham

(1976), Kanter (1979), Strauss (1977), Hackman and Oldham (1975) suggest

performance-based reward systems and enriched jobs that provide autonomy

and control, task identity, opportunities for career advancement and task

meaningfulness as ways to empower employees. At the organizational level,

however, McClelland (1975) and House (1988) suggest that empowerment

could be achieved through employee selection and training programs

designed to provide required technical skills together with a culture which

encourages self-determination and collaboration instead of competition.

A practical and process oriented definition of empowerment was offered by

Bowen and Lawler (1992). They define employee empowerment as sharing

with front-line employees, information about an organization’s performance,

information about rewards based on the organization’s performance,

knowledge that enables employees to understand and contribute to

organizational performance, and giving employees the power to make

decisions that influence organizational direction and performance.

Role Stress Role stress occurs in employee jobs that involve direct customer contact

whether in the context of a face-to-face or a telephone service encounter

(Babin & Boles, 1996; Brown & Peterson, 1993; Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn,

Snoek, & Rosenthal, 1964) has identified role conflict and role ambiguity as

the two key components of role stress. Role conflict has been defined as “the

simultaneous occurrence of two (or more) sets of pressures such that

compliance with one would make more difficult compliance with the other”

(Kahn et al., 1964, p. 19). For personnel, expectations of the organization,

the supervisor or team leaders stressing operational efficiency may clash

with the demands of customers who want problem resolution or satisfaction.

In many instances supervisors focus on technology to speed up the process

of customer interaction, not realizing that a critical element of call center

employee performance is the level of satisfaction based on meeting customer

expectations. Furthermore, modern organisations are typically a setting in

which electronic performance monitoring takes place, and recent empirical

work has shown that this is a major factor of job stress (Aiello & Kolb,

1995; Silverman & Smith, 1995). Role ambiguity occurs when a person does

not have access to sufficient information to perform his or her role as a

service employee adequately (Walker, Churchill, & Ford, 1975). Role

ambiguity may result when the employee is uncertain about the supervisory

expectations or when they do not know how their performance will be

evaluated.

The antecedents of role stress (role ambiguity and role conflict) are

clearly established in the literature. Empowerment, competence, and

leadership have been found to affect role stress. Empirical research on the

relationship between empowerment and role stress is both scarce and mixed

(Bowen and Lawler 1995). Empirical work has established a negative

relationship between empowerment and role stress (ambiguity and conflict).

The greater the perceived empowerment the less the role stress. Two

dimensions of empowerment have been identified: (1) competence and (2)

authority (Chiles & Zorn, 1995; Conger & Kanungo, 1988; Spreitzer, 1995).

Competence is an employee’s belief in the capability to perform job related

activities with skill, whereas authority reflects autonomy in the initiation and

continuation of work behavior and processes. Employees that experience a

work-specific sense of competence are more likely to assume an active

orientation with regard to their work and hence will experience lower levels

of role stress (Gist & Mitchell, 1992). Autonomous employees feel that they

have the responsibility and the power to make things happen. Many

operational aspects of a modern organization actually create pressures that

reduce the probability of employees to feel empowered. In many industries

there has been a strong emphasis on the role that information technology

plays in guiding employees through customer interactions, by selecting the

appropriate path for them to follow through so-called “screen pops”

containing communication scripts. This closely resembles the production

line approach to service delivery that has been effectively used in the fast-

food business (Bowen & Lawler, 1995).

However, in many organizations, employees have to deal with unusual and

unexpected situations in which the strong emphasis on rules and regulations

of the scripted approach lacks the required flexibility and discretionary

behavior needed to satisfy customers. The rigid focus on technology may

lead to role stress (Schaufeli, Keijsers, & Miranda, 1995). Empowered

employees are free to fine-tune service regulations contained in scripts in

order to meet or exceed customer expectations. Hartline and Ferrell (1996)

report a direct positive relationship between empowerment (operationalized

as tolerance of freedom) and role conflict and report an indirect positive

effect of empowerment on role ambiguity. This is explained by the fact that

empowerment may increase uncertainty because there are fewer standards or

procedures that can be used as guidelines by employees.

Objectives

This study has been designed to investigate the relationships as well as

the contribution of empowerment dimensions on organisational role

stress in the Indian context. It has the following objectives:

1. To investigate the relationships between empowerment and

organisational role stress.

2. To find out the contribution/impact of empowerment on organisational

role stress.

Hypotheses

It tests the following hypotheses:

1. There will be significant relationships between empowerment

dimensions and organisational role stress.

2. The empowerment dimensions will significantly contribute to

organisational role stress.

Method Sample A sample of 120 employees (male = 112, female = 8) were selected by

purposive sampling technique from 4 banks and 5 insurance companies

(both private and public) in Utter Pradesh, India. The mean age of the

participants was 38.31 years with a standard deviation of 10.41 ranging from

19 to 56 years. The average tenure of participants in their job positions was

12.99 years ranging from 1 to 31 years.

Tools

ORGANIZATIONAL ROLE STRESS SCALE (ORS)

The organizational role stress scale (ORS) used was developed by Pareek

(1997). The scale has a total of fifty items divided into ten dimensions and a

total score. The ten dimensions of the ORS are: self role distance, inter- role

distance, role stagnation, role isolation, role ambiguity, role expectation

conflict, role overload, role erosion, resource inadequacy and personal

inadequacy. It has a test-retest reliability coefficient of 0.73(Sen, 1981).

Empowerment Scale

Empowerment was assessed using the instrument developed by Spreitzer

(1995). Spreitzer’s measure, comprising four 3-item subscales, taps the em-

powerment dimensions of meaning, perceived competence, self-

determination and impact by asking respondents to indicate their degree of

agreement, or disagreement, with 12 Likert-type statements. In the present

study responses were recorded on a seven-point scale, ranging from

“strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. Alpha for a combined scale was .72

in an industrial sample and .62 in an insurance sample.

Results and Discussion

The major thrust of the present investigation was to study the relationship

between empowerment and organizational role stress. Correlation analysis

was used to measure the linear relationship between dependent and

independent variables. Multiple regression analysis was used examine the

relative impact of empowerment dimensions on organizational role stress.

Table:1 Correlation between Empowerment Dimensions and Organizational Role Stress(N = 120)

Variables MEANING COMPETENCE SELF

DETERMINATION IMPACT ORGANISATIONAL

ROLE STRESS MEANING 1 .671(**) .447(**) .687(**) -.277(**) COMPETENCE 1 .553(**) .552(**) -.524(**) SELF DETERMINATION 1 .527(**) -.344(**)

IMPACT 1 -.461(**) ORGANIZATIONAL ROLE STRESS 1

** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).

The results in Table 1 depict the kind as well as the level of relationship

between Empowerment dimensions and Organizational Role Stress. The

correlation values between them are negative and all of them have been

found to be significant. This indicates that empowerment level of the

employees help them to get into a productive process of controlling and

managing organizational role stress. To be more precise, competence,

meaning, impact and self determination help in managing their own role

stress in more intelligent ways. These findings support the findings of past

research. Earlier empirical works have also established a negative

relationship between empowerment and role stress (ambiguity and conflict).

The greater the perceived empowerment less the role stress. Two dimensions

of empowerment have been identified: (1) competence and (2) authority

(Chiles & Zorn, 1995; Conger & Kanungo, 1988; Spreitzer, 1995).

Employees that experience a work-specific sense of competence are more

likely to assume an active orientation with regard to their work and hence

will experience lower levels of role stress (Gist & Mitchell, 1992).

Table: 2 Impact of Empowerment on Organizational Role Stress (N = 120)

Predictors R R square ∆R² Beta t Sig.

COMPETENCE

.524 .274 .000 -.546 -5.431 .000

IMPACT

.563 .317 .043 -.419 -4.091 .000

MEANING .612 .375 .058 .377 3.268 .001

Table 2 reveals that when the independent variables entered in the regression

model with competence as a criterion, competence alone contributed 27.4%

of the variance. A significant increase of 4.3% was obtained in R square

when it was entered along with impact in the regression model accounting

for 31.7 % of variance. A significant increase of 5.8% was obtained in R

square when it was entered along with impact and meaning in the regression

model accounting for 37.5 % of the variance when entered in the regression

equation. It is clear from the table that competence makes the largest unique

contribution ( beta= -.546), followed by impact (beta = -.419) and meaning

(beta = .377).

The bank and insurance sector is a vibrant environment in which the

employees must handle more transactions that have increasing complexity,

with higher consumer expectations. In this environment, empowerment is

clearly seen as influencing role stress. That is, not having the power to

achieve solutions, solve problems, and answer questions is clearly stressful

as a “role issue.” At the same time empowerment competence— having the

training and skills to answer the questions, solve the problems, feeling in

control of anything that is and can be asked—feeds directly into job

satisfaction and does not affect role stress.

Implications

These results also suggest a number of managerial implications. First of all,

the empowerment seems to have a relatively strong impact in terms of role

stress reduction. One important implication seems to allow employees the

freedom to influence pace, working method, and sequence of tasks in

dealing with customers. While an increase in autonomy could be

implemented at the level of the individual employee, it has been shown that

increasing autonomy at work-group level by means of self-management

work teams significantly decreases employee role stress (Terra, 1995).

Developing empowerment autonomy could be done at three levels: (1)

strategic (i.e., general conditions of work, such as working hours, shift

systems), (2) process (i.e., change processes such as service quality

improvement by reducing response times), and (3) operational participation

(planning , scheduling, determining standards).

In stressful work environments, it has been emphasized that job rotation,

whereby employees switch jobs and learn about different duties and

responsibilities, and reinforcement of employees’ faith in their own

competencies and skills are particularly useful in increasing job satisfaction.

Employee recognition by management as well as strengthening employees’

confidence in their competence through task-related training programs may

be the key to keeping high-performance call center employees.

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