Stress, an integral part of human existence, is said to have an immense influence over the lives of individuals and the effectiveness and efficiency of the organization where they work. At the workplace, where individuals spend most of the time, various roles are performed which have to be in synchronization with the roles at home and other places. The stress induced due to roles performed by individuals (Jena and Pradhan, 2011) as employees at workplace, has been a potent organizational stressor (Kahn et al., 1964; Srivastava, 2007; and Cox and Griffiths, 2010) the outcomes of which have been found to be costly to the organization (Fisher and Gitelson, 1983). Taking into view the repercussions of role stress, researchers have applied role-theory to understand stress problems at work and examine how role pressures contribute to occupational stress (Gupta and Adhikari, 2008). Defined by employee’s own expectations from the position occupied in the organization and that of the significant others, including peers and customers, role stress has become a recognized problem at workplace, and owing to large number of human interactions, the employees working in banking sector also have not been a stranger to the phenomenon of role stress. Babin and Boles (1996), Brown and Peterson (1993), and Kahn et al. (1964) emphasized that role stress occurs in employee jobs that involve direct interaction with customers and they are prone to relatively greater level of role stress (Modekurti and Chattopadhyay, 2008; Sankpal et al., 2010).
However, the organizational and work-related factors do not lead to role stress unless perceived as stressful by the individual employees (Cox, 1993; and Chauhan and Chauhan, 2005). The individual first screens the situation, checks his or her resources and capabilities and then makes up his or her mind as to whether the situation is stressful or not. The subjective perception of the individual is dependent on various psychological and biological factors which differ from individual to individual (Swanson and Power, 1998; Tankha, 2006; and Masood, 2011). The critical importance of assessing and understanding the impact of these individual differences in determining the level of role stress at workplace, thus, comes with the realization that some employees are susceptible to high levels of role stress and others are not (Harigopal, 1980; and Srivastava and Sinha, 1984). Individual differences in personality, demography and subsequent work performance mediate between the objective environment and its subjective experience leading to varying levels of role stress for different individuals. The individual employees would differ in the way they react to stress and use various psychological, demographic, and other factors do play a crucial role to modulate the level of role stress among the employees.
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