Educational researchers have long been concerned with role stress among
teachers. The concept of role and its two related aspects, role space and role set, have
built-in potential for conflict and stress. Comparative study of
Organizational Role Stress (ORS) among technical and nontechnical teachers was carried out in Ludhiana, using
ORS Scale. The study revealed that Resource Inadequacy was higher for technical
teachers as compared to nontechnical teachers for the whole sample and for the lower age
group (< 30 years). For the higher age group (> 30 years), Personal Inadequacy and
Role Ambiguity were higher for technical teachers as compared
to nontechnical teachers.
Stress has become the most important factor influencing individual efficacy and
satisfaction in modern day occupational settings. Once stress exceeds a certain limit, it can
cause burnout and detrimentally affect work performance. In this context, the teaching
profession is increasingly characterized by occupational stress. Educational researchers have
long been concerned with role stress among teachers. This study aims at how role
stress operates on technical and nontechnical teachers. They were administered
Organizational Role Stress (ORS) Scale developed by Pareek
(2002, pp. 545-547) to measure 10 types of role stress experienced by them.
A number of studies on ORS have been conducted in educational settings
(Conley and Woosley, 2000; Jesus and Conboy, 2001; Pestonjee and Azeem, 2001; and
Antoniou et al., 2006). Mohan and Chauhan (1999) in a comparative study of 200 managers
of government, public and private sectors, found that the managers of public
sector experienced maximum Role Erosion and Self-Role Conflict, followed by government
and private sector. The private sector seems to have better work climate, which is
giving enough forward orientation in one's job role and fewer intra-personal conflicts. This
can have implications for improvement of work climate in public sector. Female
teachers experienced significantly higher levels of occupational stress, specifically with regard
to interaction with students and colleagues, workload, students' progress and
emotional exhaustion. Younger teachers experienced higher levels of burnout, specifically in
terms of emotional exhaustion and disengagement from the profession, while older
teachers experienced higher levels of stress in terms of the support they feel they receive
from the government (Antoniou et al., 2006).
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