The Impact of Role Overload on Job Performance: Examining the Mediating Role of Work-Related Stress in High-Pressure Organizational Settings

Role overload, which is the result of job demand exceeding the resources available to effectively carry out the jobs, is becoming a common phenomenon in high-pressure organizational settings. Fields such as healthcare, finance, and technology, where it leads to high levels of work-related stress, consequently worsen the performance of the employees. This paper aims to analyze the role of work-related stress as a mediator between these relationships using literature published in the last decade. The study describes the main variables, formulates the research problem, presents a hypothesis and answers two research questions based on the theoretical framework of the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model. Results reveal that work-related stress is one of the mediating factors that negatively affect job performance due to role overload, and this has an organizational intervention implication. The results of this study contributes to bring the cross-sectional studies and longitudinal designs, which is a limitation, and should be investigated in future studies.