CHAPTER FOUR: SENSE OF COHERENCE (SOC)
4.5 Types of stressors examined in the study
4.5.2 Absence of autonomy
The second work stressor examined in this study is absence of autonomy. According to Liu, Spector, and Jex (2005), autonomy is a very important part of the broad expansive concept of control. Spector and Fox (2003) report that in the centre of most theories around organisations are autonomy and control (Hackman & Oldham, 1976, 1980; Karasek Jr, 1979; Spector & Jex, 1998). Parker, Axtell, and Turner (2001) refer to job autonomy as the discretionary level that employees are allowed to make decisions with respect to important issues about their work.
Such decisions may include time and ways of performing one’s tasks at the workplace. Absence
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of autonomy refers therefore to the lack of discretion to make important decisions concerning one’s job. Job control (autonomy) is noted to be one of the imperative characteristics of the design of work that impacts the results from employees like satisfaction with their job (Hackman & Oldham, 1980; Parker & Wall, 1998). Summarily, Kim and Stoner (2008) report that the level of control that an individual has with respect to his/her proximate job schedule and duties could be referred to as job autonomy (Liu et al., 2005).
Perlow (2001) reports that the nature of a particular job in itself may affect the capacity of workers to combine effectively their work and family roles. This implies that some inherent features of a job could influence employees’ ability to cope with their work and family responsibilities. Thompson et al. (1999) report that a job which gives independence and freedom for an employee to make important decisions like how, where and when a job is to be done, empowers the employee to cope with many conflicting work and family needs. They further posit that the extent to which stress and strain is reduced is the extent to which work and family quality is enhanced, and satisfaction with both domains of life are recorded. These are the outcomes of increased perceived control and official and non-official support from the workplace and job design. This means that organisations that do not make available such supports and job design may expose their employees to increased stress, leading to poor quality of work and family life and dissatisfaction with work and family situations (imbalance).
Job autonomy has been measured from availability of flexibility (ability to choose when to start and end work) instead of the real feeling of control (Thomas & Ganster, 1995; Valcour & Batt, 2003). Thompson and Prottas (2006) refer to job autonomy as the level of freedom and discretion to arrange the flow of work and make decisions as to the method of performing a job, inherent in that job (Hackman & Oldham, 1976). Valcour and Batt (2003, p. 196) observe that autonomy in decision making should translate into greater employee ability to control decisions over when, where, and how to integrate work and family responsibilities. This implies that control and autonomy do not mean the same thing (Thompson & Prottas, 2006).
Chiang et al. (2010) found that low job autonomy and high job demands with the provision of WLBS led to increased stress levels.
The present study suggests that job autonomy could improve an individual employee’s sense of coherence and conversely reduce stress associated with absence of autonomy. This could lead to the achievement of satisfaction with work and family which are indicators of WLB.
This is supported by the report by Liu et al. (2005) that a connection has been established to
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exist between job autonomy and the mental, physiological and behavioural results of employees. Citing Spector (1986), Liu et al. (2005) further report that felt autonomy associated positively with satisfaction (at personal and organisational levels), responsibility, involvement, work outcomes, and incentive. It associates negatively with physiological signs, absence from work, high rate of employee turnover and intention to leave an organisation, emotive distress and role-related stress. Moreover, there are studies that report that felt control associates negatively with neurotic disease (Kornhauser, 1965), depression (Karasek Jr, 1979) stomach ache, insomnia, head pains, and heart conditions (Hurrell & Lindström, 1992), and nervousness (Kohn & Schooler, 1973; Kornhauser, 1965; Miller, Schooler, Kohn, & Miller, 1979; Nahar, Hossain, Rahman, & Bairagi, 2013; Schooler, 2014).
Thompson and Prottas (2006) report that job autonomy could affect the wellness of an employee and his/her family life positively. They further report that literature has shown that employees who have the discretionary power to say how, when and where their work is to be done, observe that they are highly satisfied with the work they do (Clark, 2001; Hackman &
Oldham, 1976; S. Parasuraman & Alutto, 1984). Clark (2001) reports that individuals having job autonomy have a higher probability of reporting cohesiveness in their families, feel reduced stress (Parasuraman & Alutto, 1984), reduced work-family stress (Parasuraman & Alutto, 1984), and reduced work-family clash (S. Parasuraman, Purohit, Godshalk, & Beutell, 1996).
Conversely, it could be argued therefore that employees who experience absence of autonomy would report impaired health and wellness, dissatisfaction with work, lack of family cohesion and increased stress and work-family clashes. The present study proposes that an individual with SOC and facing absence of autonomy in the work place will report less of the associate vices enumerated above while his/her colleague with a weak SOC will experience the vices.
When considering absence of autonomy, questions on how it affects job stress, SOC and other and WLB become imperative. According to Batt and Valcour (2003), the autonomy to make decisions about one’s job heightens workers’ feelings of control in their jobs. They further posit that employees’ control over their work could also be linked to their control of other facets of personal life. Similarly, it could be assumed that when there is absence of autonomy, an employee could also feel that he/she has no control over other aspects of life especially among those individuals having weak SOC.
There is empirical evidence that shows that people are inspired to look for ways of controlling their surroundings, and having this control has been reported to impact health and wellness (
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Bond & Bunce, 2003; Ganster, Fox, & Dwyer, 2001; Greenberger & Strasser, 1986; Marmot
& Stansfield, 1997). Greenberger and Strasser (1986) argue that there exists in organisations, situations that heighten the feeling of control, or reduce them. For instance, refusing to approve the request by an employee to have some days away from work could reduce the employee’s feeling of control while on the other hand, permitting an employee to work from his/her home once in a while could boost the feeling of control (Thompson & Prottas, 2006). Consequently it could be inferred that absence of autonomy inherent in a job could impair a person’s perception of self-control which could lead to stress; and stress could adversely affect an individual’s SOC. Adams and Jex (1999) discovered that when a person perceives that he/she has control, this mediates the association between tactics used in managing time (prioritising and goal-setting) and satisfaction with work as well as well-being. Cordery, Morrison, Wright, and Wall (2010) found that autonomy among teams improved their performance. These important findings point to the fact that autonomy and control could be valuable when considering the work-family interface.
Generally studies on job autonomy and control typically use self-report data collected from employees. The questionnaires assess the way employees perceive control as well as their satisfaction with work (Spector et al., 2006). Evidence from studies show that these variables could correlate (Spector, 1986; Fried & Ferris 1987), yet there are scholars that query the findings of these studies due to the limitedness of the interpretation of such findings (Spector, 1992; Frese & Zapf, 1988; Taber & Taylor, 1990; Roberts & Glick, 1981) and the absence of clarity on the extent of correlations between the variables and particular job situations. The present study adopts self-report methodology of data collection because the case of autonomy, which is subjective to the individual and often, only such individuals can proffer credible and objective answers to questions in the regard.
In the present study, absence of autonomy was measured by engaging the Factual Autonomy Scale (Fast, Williamson, & Keating, 1999). The FAS scale was constructed to determine the way in which employees appraise their ability to choose how and when work commences or ends daily (Spector & Fox, 2003). The scale was propounded to confound the problems associated with self-rated measures used in measuring job stressors. One of the problems is the subjectivity of the scales which yields inconclusive outcome with more variables (Suominen, Helenius, Blomberg, Uutela, & Koskenvuo, 2001). Among the items on the scale are “In your present job, how often do you have to ask permission?” to 1) take a rest or 2) leave early for
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the day. The response choices from items 1-7 are Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Quite often, and Always, while Never, Once or twice, Once or twice per month, Once or twice per week, and Everyday are the response choices for items 8 to 10. Items 1-7 are based on a 5-point scale ranging from 1= Never and 5 = Always, while items 8-10 are based on a five point scale ranging from 1=Never and 5 = every day.