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

supervisors/managers and customers) are incompatible or incongruent (Agarwal and Ramaswami 1993;Singh 1998; Tubre and Collins 2000).Research shows that the relationship between role stress and OC is generally negative, althoughsome stress can be positive for performance (Boles and Babin 1996), at least in the short term. Forexample, Singh (1998) found role stress to be positively influencing organizational commitment and jobperformance. The negative relationship is based on the idea that individuals who work in a workenvironment characterized by high role stress, are less likely to be willing to spend effort on theorganization they work for (Örtqvist and Wincent 2006). A recent meta-analysis by Örtqvist and Wincent(2006) found that both role stressors tend to influence OC negatively, but to varying degrees.As discussed above, role ambiguity and conflict are hypothesized to reduce the level of AC andNC employees‘ experience. It stands to reason that individuals who feel that they have to remain in theorganization but do not really want to, will perceive that the influence of role stress increases their level ofCC. Hence it is hypothesized:H 1 : a) Role ambiguity, b) role conflict reduce the levels of AC and NC that FLEs‘ experienceH 2 : a) Role ambiguity, b) role conflict increase the CC levels that FLEs‘ experience.The moderating influence of managerial interventionsLiterature suggests that employee attitudes like OC and role stressors are affected by managerialdecisions, interventions and the resource allocation of firms (Hartline and Ferrell 1996; Singh, Verbekeand Rhoads 1996; Heskett et al. 1997), and that organizational characteristics are more significantlyrelated to OC than personal characteristics (Cohen 1992; Mathieu and Zajac 1990; Meyer, Irving andAllen 1998). However, marketers have been more interested in studying direct rather than moderatingeffects of organizational variables (Singh, Verbeke and Rhoads 1996). Based on role stress theories (suchas Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn and Snoek‘s (1964) role episode model and Lazarus and Folkman‘s (1985)