Cross-national studies of job stress have not kept pace with other streams of research in the international milieu. To begin to address this lack of development, we examined the relationships among role stressors, general self-efficacy (GSE), and burnout across nine regions (i.e., U.S., Germany, France, Brazil, Israel, Japan, China, Hong Kong, and Fiji). Findings indicated GSE had a universally negative association with burnout across all regions. Further, self-efficacy mediated the relationship between role conflict and/or role ambiguity and burnout across eight of the nine cultures. Conclusions center around how low self-efficacy may help to explain why occupational role stressors have a positive association with burnout cross-nationally. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.
The literature on occupational stress and burnout has grown exponentially over the past two decades. One reason for the expansive interest is the consistent finding that experienced stress can have deleterious effects on individuals' mental and physical health (e.g., Ganster and Schaubroeck, 1991, Kahn et al., 1964 and Westman, 1992), as well as negative effects on organizational outcomes such as performance (e.g., Westman and Eden, 1992) and turnover (e.g., O'Driscoll and Beehr, 1994). Because stress has been shown to lead to the harmful consequences noted above, identifying models that begin to explain why these negative effects occur represents a great challenge for researchers. Adding further complexity to the study of job stress is the understanding that organizations are operating more globally and that research assessing the impact of job stress on a variety of work outcomes in other domains has been minimal. Many authors have noted that cross-national management research is needed more than ever because we can no longer assume that Western concepts and theories transcend cultural and national boundaries (e.g., Peng et al., 1991 and Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, 1998).
The purpose of this study is to investigate the cross-national universality of the impact that role stressors have on work outcomes and to further explore why these relationships occur. Early arguments that the “self” should be viewed as representing an active role in work organizations Bandura, 1978 and Brief and Aldag, 1981 has stimulated research interest in the individual as exerting significant effects on both behaviors and the environment. Indeed, recent work on self-efficacy has illustrated its relevance to the cross-cultural literature (Shaffer et al., 1999), as well as to stress research (Bandura, 1997). To a great extent, however, researchers have failed to incorporate stress variables in cross-national stress research in a theoretically meaningful manner despite recent appeals to do so ( Bond and Smith, 1996; Jamal, 1999). To address this limitation, we focus our attention on role conflict and role ambiguity as stressors and burnout as the psychological outcome, with general self-efficacy (GSE) serving as the intermediate linkage or explanatory variable in this relationship. In the following section, we will discuss the stress-related and country variables in our study. In turn, we will present our specific research questions and the methods used to explore these questions. We conclude this paper with a discussion of our findings regarding the global universality of a model of stress relationships across cultures.
