A study on impact of Job role stressors on Frontline employee role performance towards the customers

Rapid developments in the Indian Economy post-liberalization in 1991 have prompted institutions like the World Bank to forecast that India would be the fourth largest economy in the world by 2020 (Budhwar and Bhatnagar, 2009). Following globalization this has attracted a large numbers of foreign investors and companies to India. HRM in India has evolved as a specialised function (Budhwar and Bhatnagar, 2009). According to Budhwar and Bhatnagar, 2009 India had a long history of labour legislation and industrial relations and there are many challenges to the HRM systems in India, due to the diverse nature of India’s society which is marked by regional, sectoral, socio-cultural and political variation. In such a climate it is extremely difficult to have a uniform HR system. According to Wheatherly and Tansik (1993) employees have to deal with the demands from superiors as well as the needs and wishes of customers. Because of such a boundary spanning role, the retail frontline employees are in dilemma whether to customize the retail services as per customers needs or to obey the organizational guidelines and procedures (Bitner, 1990). This dilemma often leads to job role stress. There are different types of job role stress (Pareek, 1993) of these the research under study deals with the two job role stressors prominent in retail industry job role conflict and job role ambiguity ( Kahn et.al, 1964). According to Heskett et al. (2003) front line employee’s behavior and perception affects the customer satisfaction and intent of buying behavior which in turn have impact on service productivity. There have been many studies conducted on job role stress and its impact on employee job performance but hardly any with respect to organized Indian retail sector.In the prior research studies it can be noted that employee point of view is hardly taken into consideration. Hence as an attempt to fill in this gap the research focuses on understanding how job role stressors (role conflict & role ambiguity) have significant impact on frontline employee role performance towards the customers with special reference to departmental stores located in central, western and harbor suburbs of Mumbai. The study starts with investigating whether frontline employee role performance towards the customers is dependent on job role stressors i.e. role conflict and role ambiguity by means of non-parametric chi-square test. Then it is investigated whether there is negative or positive relationship between job role stress i.e. role conflict and role ambiguity and frontline employee role performance by using Spearman correlation coefficient. The research is explanatory in nature. The sampling design used is stratified random sampling. The research focuses on the dynamics of human element, especially employee engagement, which is key contributor of success with respect to service sector, especially in retail in India.