Index of Paper Presentations for the Parallel Sessions - Academy of ...

Can we manage the influence of role stressors on organizational commitment of front-lineemployees?Anna-Lena Ackfeldt and *Neeru MalhotraThis study investigates the influence of role stressors on organizational commitment. Suppositionsthat managerial interventions (empowerment and professional development) significantlymoderate the relationships between role stressors and organizational commitment are tested in asample of 184 FLEs. Role ambiguity and conflict influence affective and normative commitmentnegatively, exhibiting no effect on continuance commitment. Empirical evidence of howmanagerial interventions moderate the role stress-organizational commitment relationships isalso presented. Limitations of the study are discussed and a program of further research issketched.Research suggests that customers often base their perceptions of service organizations on theirinteractions with customer-contact staff during service encounters (Babin and Boles 1998; Hartline andFerrell 1996). Given the importance of front-line employees (FLEs) to service organizations,organizational commitment (OC) is a job attitude that ought to be of interest to managers foster andinfluence (Cohen 1992).Because of their boundary-spanning role, FLEs generally have multiple roles to fulfill, and areanswerable to demands from managers, customers and, in some cases, other employees (Bitner 1990;Boles and Babin 1996; Brown and Peterson 1993; Goolsby 1992; Singh 2000; Tubre and Collins 2000;Wetzels, de Ruyter and Bloemer 2000), causing them to experience role stress. From a managerialperspective, it is of interest to create a low stress work environment as role stress has been found to beundesirable (Boles and Babin 1996; Goolsby 1992; Singh and Rhoads 1991; Singh, Verbeke and Rhoads1996), and deleterious for employee effectiveness (Singh, Verbeke and Rhoads 1996). It is also of interest