Role Strain in Diversified Role Sets

One important source of role strain is the requirement to maintain working relationships with persons in a wide variety of complementary roles. It is shown that in a national sample of wage and salary workers high job-related tension is associated with frequency of interaction with each of five classes of role senders and even more strongly with the total number of different role relationships required by the respondent's job. Role-set diversity is more common in supervisory than in non-supervisory jobs, but the association between tension and supervisory responsibility is not wholly accounted for by the influence of role-set diversity. Differences in role-set diversity and number of supervisory jobs account for a good deal of the differential prevalence of high tension in large as compared to small organizations. There is also some support for the hypothesis that high diversity is more tension-producing in large organizations than in smaller ones. Finally, the results show that the relationships between tension and sex, age, or education are substantially reduced once the influence of role diversity and supervisory responsibility has been taken into account.