A review of six decades of research on workplace stressors has led to one worrisome conclusion: role ambiguity is one of the biggest stressors that employees experience. Unclear employee roles are not a new concept, but the modern workplace has the workforce performing more than one duty, taking on tasks that are either unrelated to their original titles or in excess of what they were promised during the hiring cycle. New research on workplace stress, published in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, examined over 515 studies and 588 samples to synthesize the available data on role stressors and explored their impact and outcomes over the years. Role ambiguity, role conflict, and role overload are among the major workplace stressors today.
A review of 60 years of research data revealed that role ambiguity is one of the biggest role stressors affecting the workforce. (Image: Pexels)
Trying to Understand Workplace Stressors? Role Ambiguity May Be Holding Your Workforce Back
A new meta-analysis, published in the Journal of Vocational Behavior by a team of distinguished researchers, examined a comprehensive range of research papers from 1964 to December 2024 to gain a deeper understanding of how three prominent and related workplace stressors affect employees.
The first was role ambiguity, or the uncertainty about the terms of employment and what the job entails. The next focus area was on role conflict, where employees had to manage tasks that were at odds with each other. The third major workplace stressor was identified as role overload, which referred to the obvious increment in workplace responsibility, with tasks piling up faster than ever before.
While we occasionally talk about role overload in the workplace and the importance of balanced schedules, role ambiguity is rarely addressed, and as the study shows, it might be one of the most harmful stressors around.
Productivity Isn’t An Option When These Workplace Stressors Aren’t Addressed First
Productivity and efficiency are the most common goals of any organization today, but for the most part, employers focus on what can be done to increase productivity rather than exploring what is holding employees back from being productive. When the workforce is inundated with these major workplace stressors, they find themselves in a position where they cannot operate to the best of their abilities. Role ambiguity is one example of a problem that often starts right from the day an employee is hired to join the organization.
Poor role clarity can begin when employers upload elaborate job descriptions to recruit a candidate, with insufficient information on their day-to-day activities. It can be evident when the job description is an outdated one, leaving a new hire to discover what their actual job is as they go along. With undefined operations within the workplace, new hires find themselves filling in all the gaps in operations in the workplace, losing sight of what they were actually hired to do. Over time, these odd jobs become a part of their daily routine, with other, more niche tasks being assigned to them without reason.
Role ambiguity results from a lack of defined parameters for each position and often increases as a result of employers firing employees and choosing not to replace them. This leaves a lot of tasks for the remaining employees to pick up, forcing them to increase their workloads, perform incongruent roles, and eventually lose sight of their own duties and goals. With such chaos in workplace identity, it’s no surprise that role ambiguity is ranked so highly among workplace stressors.
Clarity on the Job Means Clarity In Operations
The workplace stress study reminds us of the importance of addressing the employee experience and building clarity around all operations in the workplace. Downsizing and layoff plans are pushing workers into smaller and smaller teams with reduced hierarchical connections. On one hand, this may simplify communication and the exchange of information across teams. But on the other hand, cutting too deeply into the workforce may force employees to fill in for each other, taking on roles that have little to do with their actual duties.
Role ambiguity at work doesn’t have to stem from a shrunken workforce, but merely a lack of defined expectations at work. When employees don’t know the metrics they are to be evaluated on or what it takes to succeed at the organization, it can further cause their performance to suffer from scattered efforts. Defining teams, duties, operations, and divisions may seem like an unnecessary expenditure of effort, but delineation offers clarity, and clarity can open the door to more fruitful results.
What do you think about role ambiguity as a major workplace stressor? Share your thoughts and experiences with us. Subscribe to The HR Digest for more insights on workplace trends, layoffs, and what to expect with the advent of AI.
