Role Senders Research Articles

Budgetary Attitudes: The Effects of Role Senders, Stress and Performance Evaluation

Budgetary Attitudes: The Effects of Role Senders, Stress and Performance Evaluation

Role conflict and ambiguity: an empirical investigation of nursing personnel.

A review of the nursing literature provides a number of hypotheses regarding levels among nurses of role ambiguity (uncertainty regarding others' expectations) and role conflict (incompatible demands from various role senders or from multiple roles held simultaneously). Questionnaire data collected from 504 registered staff nurses, licensed practical nurses, nurses aides and head nurses/supervisors in five hospitals failed to provide much support for these hypotheses. Although levels of role conflict and ambiguity were low for most nurses, they were significantly related to job stress, organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and intentions to quit.

Social-Role Correlates of Driving Accidents

In a replication study a Driver Role Scale once again discriminated between groups of young men in manual occupations with and without accident records. Extensions to the original study found that a Drink Scale and a Leisure Satisfaction Scale also discriminated between the groups. But a Conflicting Communications Scale and a Job Satisfaction Scale showed no difference between the groups. The results are consistent with a model that sees peers as critical role senders requiring drinking, driving, and risk-taking.

Organizational role conflict: Its antecedents and consequences

The linkages and underlying structure of a comprehensive model relating role conflict to its antecedents and consequences were tested using multivariate behavioral research methodology. Data were drawn from professional-level employees representing five major roles in nine organizations. Role conflict was treated as a multivariate construct consisting of various conflict types. Antecedents of role conflict included objective role requirements (i.e., integration and boundary-spanning activities, personnel supervision activities, and nonsupervisory scientific research activities) and characteristics of the role set (i.e., average organizational distance and average authority of role senders). Consequences included job-related tension and satisfaction, perceived effectiveness, and attitude toward role senders. Using a cluster analytic approach, five distinct conflict orientation groups were isolated. An analysis of the simultaneous linkages between antecedents and conflict orientation revealed an additive continuum composed of objective role conditions which stratified the five conflict orientations, highlighting the impact of simultaneous role requirements. Finally, work-related outcomes were shown to be significantly different for individuals in different conflict orientation groups. In addition to providing support for previous findings, this comprehensive approach provides new insights into the nature of conflict in organizations.

A Social Role Approach to Driver Behaviour

An 11-item Driver Role Scale questionnaire discriminated between young, male, manual workers with and without accident records. Peers were role senders and influenced driver behaviour.

Role strain in diversified role sets.

One important source of role strain is the requirement to maintain working relationships with persons in a wide variety of complementary roles. It is shown that in a national sample of wage and salary workers high job-related tension is associated with frequency of interaction with each of five classes of role senders and even more strongly with the total number of different role relationships required by the respondent's job. Role-set diversity is more common in supervisory than in non-supervisory jobs, but the association between tension and supervisory responsibility is not wholly accounted for by the influence of role-set diversity. Differences in role-set diversity and number of supervisory jobs account for a good deal of the differential prevalence of high tension in large as compared to small organizations. There is also some support for the hypothesis that high diversity is more tension-producing in large organizations than in smaller ones. Finally, the results show that the relationships between tension and sex, age, or education are substantially reduced once the influence of role diversity and supervisory responsibility has been taken into account.