Goal Specificity and Difficulty and Leader Initiating Structure as Strategies For Managing Role Stress

Abstract

Role stress increasingly is becoming more pervasive and dysfunctional for individuals and organizations. Therefore, strategies for managing role stress are presented in this paper. Specifically, two strategies are presented in theframework of a model that allows us to examine several organizational components related to role stress conditions. Namely, a role perception model of goal setting content and leader initiating structure is presented in order to examine the relative effectiveness of these two important aspects of organization behavior as strategies to reduce role stress and to increase employee satisfaction. It was hypothesized that both goal setting content and leader initiating structure are related to employee satisfaction because of their association with the stressful conditions of role conflict and ambiguity. That is, the relationships between goal setting content and satisfaction and between leader initiating structure and satisfaction are reduced when the effects of role conflict and ambiguity are removed. The results of the research presented here strongly supported those relationships.