gender differential paper IJCRB

ijcrb.webs.com
INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH IN BUSINESS
JUNE 2011
VOL 3, NO 2
“felt job stress” (Motowidlo, Packard, &Manning, 1986; Parker & DeCotiis, 1983). Felt job
stress refers to logic of time pressure, anxiety, and concern that is related with job tasks. The
mere occurrence of stressors does not automatically lead to such felt stress. Individuals may
suffer stressors or scatter their effects either cognitively or behaviorally, and thus felt job stress
can be familiar both from stressors and from physiological symptoms. The attention theory of
stress suggests that there should be a positive association between felt job stress and job
performance. Extensive experimental research supports Easterbrook’s (1959) argument that
although stress depletes an individual’s resources, it paradoxically has the effect of concentrating
remaining resources on the task at hand (Huguet, Galvaing, Monteil, & Dumas, 1999).
Yet workplace-based evidence for a relationship between felt job stress and job performance is
weak and conflicting (Beehr, 1995; Jex, 1998).In this section result of insufficient notice to the
Sources of stress. LePine and his colleagues (2005) showed during meta-analysis that stressors
that are hindrance-oriented (e.g., organizational politics, red tape, role ambiguity) are negatively
related to job performance, but challenge-oriented stressors (e.g., high workload, time pressure,
job scope). Encourage workers and can be positively associated to job performance even as they
suggest other strains such as exhaustion and tiredness. There are likely to be restrictions to the
range, even in reaction to challenges, within which improved stress results in the fruitful
redirection of attention. Researchers have long recommended such limits: Yerkes and Dodson
(1908) hypothesized an inverted U-shaped association between stresses and performance. Lepine
et al. (2005) argued that countervailing negative sound effects of strains can accompany positive
effects of felt stress consequential from challenges to achieve, even when hindrance stressors are
not present. As persons devote growing awareness to symptoms of stress such as exhaustion,
they may become less able to give the focused awareness to the task at hand that, attention theory
suggests, will drive performance. The reason of the consideration approach implies not presently
limits to the stress-performance association, but possible moderators of that association.
Attention theory distinguishes between jobs or task attributes that are to be responded to and
attributes that are to be unnoticed. Individuals who feel stress organize their attention
differentially, so that performance on attributes of the extent requiring an answer may increase
even as responses to ignorable scope diminish sharply (Matthews & Margetts, 1991). The
attention approach is complete significant when an assigned task has a high priority for an
individual and when the task is familiar to the individual (Easterbrook, 1959; Matthews &
Margetts, 1991)Organizational settening commitments and job experience are possible to
moderate the stress performance relationship. Commitments (which leads individuals to struggle
toward organizational goals) and experiences (which breeds task knowledge) each should guide
individuals to focus more significantly on job performance under stress. We therefore turn next
to discussions of these possible moderators and associated hypotheses concerning their effects on
performance.
Commitment as a Moderator of the Stress-Performance Relationship
Commitment has been studied broadly and has been theoretically linked to work outcomes such
as job performance and absenteeism. At least six meta-analyses address the relationship between
Commitment and performance (Cohen, 1991; Jaramillo, Mulki, & Marshall, 2005; Mathieu &
Zajac, 1990; Randall, 1990; Riketta, 2002; Wright & Bonett, 2002).
Regardless of extensive research and strong theoretical reasons to expect that individuals with
higher levels of organizational commitment will achieve better, verification of this relationship
is, surprisingly, mixed (Mowday, Porter, & Steers, 1982; Wright & Bonett, 2002). Refinement
COPY RIGHT © 2011 Institute of Interdisciplinary Business Research 383