A META‐ANALYSIS OF WORK DEMAND STRESSORS AND JOB PERFORMANCE: EXAMINING MAIN AND MODERATING EFFECTS

TLDR

The meta‑analysis combined 169 studies (35,265 employees) examining seven work‑related stressors—role ambiguity, role conflict, role overload, job insecurity, work–family conflict, environmental uncertainty, and situational constraints—against job performance. Across all studies, each stressor was negatively correlated with job performance, with role ambiguity and situational constraints showing the strongest effects; moderators revealed stronger negative links for managers on role overload, publication year influenced the direction of role ambiguity and overload effects, and the Rizzo et al. scale attenuated these correlations.

Abstract

We quantitatively integrated 169 samples ( N = 35,265 employees) that have been used to investigate the relationships of the following 7 work‐related stressors with job performance: role ambiguity, role conflict, role overload, job insecurity, work–family conflict, environmental uncertainty, and situational constraints. Overall, we obtained a negative mean correlation between each job performance measure and each stressor included in our analyses. As hypothesized, role ambiguity and situational constraints were most strongly negatively related to performance, relative to the other work‐related stressors. Analysis of moderators revealed that (a) the negative correlation of role overload and performance was higher among managers relative to nonmanagers; (b) publication year moderated the relation of role ambiguity and role overload with performance, although in opposite directions; (c) the correlations obtained for published versus unpublished studies were not significantly different; and (d) using the Rizzo et al. scale of role ambiguity and role conflict decreased the magnitude of the correlations of these stressors with performance, relative to other scales. Theoretical contributions, future research directions, and practical implications are discussed.