Role stressors and prosocial performance: The effect of emotional exhaustion and job engagement

Recent research on role stressors suggests that stressors may act as hindrances, depleting resources and reducing work performance, or as challenges, promoting self-development and growth. Within the trilogy of role stressors, comprising role ambiguity, role conflict, and role overload, only the latter has been thought to act as a challenge stressor. To further explore these mechanisms, the present paper examined a model of role stressors in which emotional exhaustion and job engagement were used as mediators between stressors and supervisor-rated prosocial performance. To examine our research model, we conducted a study in a sample of 247 employees and their supervisors affiliated with a variety of organizations and industries. The results of structural equation modeling analyses indicated that role ambiguity, role conflict, and role overload all exerted positive effects on employee emotional exhaustion. In contrast, role ambiguity, and to a lesser degree role conflict, had negative effects on employee job engagement, while role overload was positively related to job engagement. In turn, job engagement mediated a negative relationship between role ambiguity and role conflict and employee prosocial performance, and a positive relationship between role overload and prosocial performance. Finally, the effects of the three role stressors onto emotional exhaustion did not extend to prosocial performance as emotional exhaustion was unrelated to prosocial performance. We discuss the implications of these findings in the context of the hindrance-challenge framework of role stressors.